this is my favorite song from what is probably one of my five favorite albums ever. i love everything about the way it sounds and the way it was produced and the way jay’s voice sounds over it. i think about this song all the time w/r/t production - i love the way that the bass is actually just the piano sample with a low pass filter over it, i love how messy the nas sample in the chorus is and how little bits of it kind of scrape up against the rest of the track tonally and threaten not to fit. all the beats on reasonable doubt represent not just my favorite rap production but some of my favorite music ever in any medium. i’ve tried to find other stuff like this, like i read all about clark kent and dj ski who produced many of these songs and went and dug up their other work on records like camp lo’s “uptown saturday night” but nothing really touched “reasonable doubt” for me
like post-reasonable doubt jay-z i don’t really connect with super hard, but anyway, i cried when jay-z and beyonce were singing coldplay to each other partly because of the reasons everyone else loved that part of the movie but also because jay-z is responsible for some of the most important music to me that exists in the world that i think about every day when i am working on my own music
