The long awaited memoir of the greatest rapper of all time (yeah I said it!), will finally be available for purchase on November 16th.
Decoded the fully-illustrated volume decodes 36 songs from Shawn Carter‘s immense back catalog, offering readers a first-hand account of Jay-Z‘s life through rhyme.

As well as a hardback edition Decoded’s publishers Random House will also publish “Decoded” as an eBook, as well as creating an iPhone/iPad application that will include exclusive video and content.

Take a peek at an excerpt from Decoded after the jump as well as a video clip of Jay-Z breaking down his verse from “Most Kingz”…

“When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics-not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC-are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.”