"Can't Knock the Hustle" is released

Why it matters

"Can't Knock the Hustle" came out as a single September 9, 1996, from Reasonable Doubt. The producer was Knobody. Mary J. Blige sings the chorus. Jay-Z opens the song, and the album, with the line "yeah, sippin' Cristal with Bis-Mi-Llah," which is the kind of bar a young rapper writes when he wants you to know he can drop a Quranic invocation into a champagne lyric without breaking stride. The song is Jay-Z's mission statement on his own debut album. The conceit is direct: nobody can blame the hustler for hustling. The Mary J. hook (sampling Marlena Shaw's "California Soul") gives the song the chart-radio cushion that the rest of Reasonable Doubt sometimes does not have. "Can't Knock the Hustle" was not a huge hit in 1996; it peaked outside the top 40. But it is the first Jay-Z single most casual listeners encountered, and it set the template for the next ten years of Jay singles built around big R&B hooks with him doing surgical writing underneath. You can hear the Roc-A-Fella commercial formula getting built in this song. The formula worked.