Interview: Jay-Z - The oldest rapper in town

ON JAY-Z's 2007 album, American Gangster, he slipped in and out of an alter ego, drug dealer Frank Lucas, for some street-level action. But with What We Talkin' About, the opening song on new album The Blueprint 3, he rejects "fiction" to promise "fact". No fantasies this time. Instead he's confronting what it is to be a mature rapper – rich, famous, well-respected, pushing 40.

His worst problems in the new songs are envious rivals and naysayers, and the self-imposed pressure to keep moving On to the Next One (although that song insists it comes naturally).

Throughout The Blueprint 3 he cites his expensive cars, his TriBeCa loft, his place on the Forbes.com Celebrity 100 list of highest-paid entertainers (though he ranks well below his wife, Beyoncé) and his role – "a small part" – in helping elect President Barack Obama. But all the business, Jay-Z says, is just a means to an end: making music and keeping hip hop vital. That's right: after a decade of bragging about his entrepreneurial prowess and its rewards, Jay-Z insists they are beside the point.

"I like music," he says when we meet, at his studio, Roc the Mic. "I can do without business. I think all artists should be paid for their work, but business is business. It's like a necessary part of it for me, more so than something I enjoy." He adds: "I want to be remembered as an artist first, but it's not up to me."

At 39, Jay-Z is hip hop's reigning anomaly: a grown-up, level-headed, career-minded adult who has stayed at the top of the charts. His songs have told and retold the poverty-to-bling story of Shawn Carter, Jay-Z's real name, who grew up in the tough Marcy Houses area in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and dealt drugs before turning to hip hop. By the time his first album came out, he says, "I was the oldest 26-year-old you ever wanted to meet". Then, all his boasts came true. In So Ambitious on the new album, he raps: "I went from pauper to the president/'Cause every deal I ever made set precedent."

Most rappers would be lucky to have an album or two in the Top 10 before being supplanted by younger, brasher competition. Yet Jay-Z reached the top and has remained there since he released debut album Reasonable Doubt in 1996. That album, and the nine solo albums since, have all sold at least a million copies in the United States alone.

On The Blueprint 3 he mentions more than once that he has had ten No 1 albums: "Maybe now 11," he adds in a track called Thank You. (Actually, he has had eight No 1 albums on his own: every Jay-Z album since 1998. The other two were collaborations, with R Kelly and Linkin Park.)

From 2004 to 2007 Jay-Z was the president of Def Jam Recordings, which had been releasing his albums since 1997. He put in regular office hours and signed acts including Rihanna, who joins Jay-Z and his producer, Kanye West, in Run This Town on The Blueprint 3. Working at a major label, he says, "I learned that every day you have to remind yourself why you got into this in the first place. If you lose that passion and fire, then you start doing things by the book."

Last year, as his own contract with Def Jam neared its end, he faced the new economic conditions of pop – dwindling album sales that make performing and licensing more reliable sources of income – and stepped outside the established recording companies. He made a ten-year, $150 million (£91m) deal with the concert promoter Live Nation, encompassing his albums, tours, publishing and endorsements while financing his own recording company and management firm, Roc Nation. Its releases will be manufactured and distributed, but not owned, by Atlantic Records and then by Sony.

"I don't get dropped, I drop the label," he raps on the new album. He now calls the old record companies "archaic," and says they made a huge error in 2000 when they sued to stop Napster, which popularised free file sharing. "They had it all in one place coming through one hole, where they could control it," he says. "They shut that down, and just opened the floodgates. Now everyone's running their own Napster. Now it's just a hole in the universe, and it's too late." The tailspin of the record labels, he says, is "the music business purging itself" of acts that rely more on promotion than talent. Now, he adds, shrunken labels can't afford the hype: "You have to find the genuine article and put the genuine music on and that's the only thing that works. That's going to work forever."

The Blueprint 3 mixes its boasts with manifestos about the state of hip hop, which "saved my life", he says. "When someone does something for you, it's only right you repay that tenfold, and that was what hip hop did for me. How could I not protect that or leave it in a good place for the next generation?"

Jay-Z turns 40 in December, and he's well aware that hip hop has younger demographics. "The reason you turn off the hip hop as you mature is because there's not enough of what you're going through in your life currently," he says. "There's not a lot of people who have come of age in rap because it's only 30. As more people come of age, hopefully the topics get broader and then the audience will stay around longer.

"But it's so much viewed as a young person's sport right now at this present moment that it's very difficult. You want to get on the radio, and you've got to make a jingle that's catchy, that sounds like everything else that's on the radio." He laughs. "Not me, the other guy."

For the album's first single, he pointedly chose DOA (Death of Auto-Tune), which ridicules the robotic, computer-tuned hip hop aimed at pop radio play and ringtone sales. The track's producer, No ID, says Jay-Z wrote the lyrics overnight while working with No ID and Kanye West. "We were having a debate about the direction sonically of the album. Someone joked that Jay-Z needed to write a song to compete with Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, who reached No 1 with Crank That, a novelty dance hit. I saw his facial expression. The next morning it was done."

DOA starts with a dissonant saxophone and a psychedelic guitar. "It doesn't have a hook," Jay-Z says happily. "But it was the right thing to do at the right time, and it felt good. And then the question happens: what are you doing it for anyway? Are you doing it to make a No 1 record, or are you doing it to invoke conversation, to make art, to push the culture? That's way more important than a No 1 record."

He continues: "It was a point in time when people had to discuss, where are we going now? Are we going to continue down this path or are we not?"

The Blueprint 3 relies largely on hip hop's name-brand producers. Most of the songs are from West, who supplies lush, string-laden, fanfaring tracks; there are also productions by Timbaland, including an austere electronic battle-of-the-sexes rap called Venus vs Mars, and snappy, invigorating tracks from Swizz Beatz, Shux and the Inkredibles. Jay-Z has guests including Alicia Keys and young hip hop hit makers such as Drake, Kid Cudi and Young Jeezy. "My phone calls get returned before I finish dialing the number," Jay-Z says.

The Blueprint 3 repeatedly insists, in songs like Young Forever and Off That, that Jay-Z is still ahead of the pack: "Even if I slow it down, my sound is fast forward," he declares in Off That, while the speed of the music playfully fluctuates. He has already announced his next album will be more experimental. Lately he has been citing indie-rock bands. He and Beyoncé showed up at a Grizzly Bear gig in Brooklyn; tonight he supports Coldplay in Glasgow.

"Hip-hop is about the gift of discovery," he says. "It's who has the newest sneakers, who has the new pants.

"So if I go to school with Jay-Z on my iPod, they go, 'OK, we all know him.' You have to come to school with some new band that no-one else has heard of. As an artist you're fighting against everything that's new. So not only are you swimming upstream, you have someone pulling on your leg: the new guy, the weight of the new guy."

He shifts similes. "It's like a crowded hallway full of people and you have to walk against it. Some don't make it to the end of the hall. You're always in the way. You have to be built for competition."

Jay-Z performs with Coldplay at Hampden Park, Glasgow, tonight. The Blueprint 3 is out now.