Who's gonna run this town tonight? Jay-Z has the answer: Roc Nation, the label he set up the previous year: "This is Roc Nation, pledge of allegiance."
He's never been shy about promoting his endeavors in his songs.
Rihanna does a lot of the lifting on this song, singing the hook, which also opens the track. Jay-Z signed Rihanna to Def Jam Records in 2005 after she came to America from Barbados. He left the label in 2007 after guesting on her hit "
Umbrella." In 2013, after Rihanna's Def Jam contract was fulfilled, she signed with Roc Nation.
Kanye West is also on the track, adding a verse. He and Jay-Z go back a long way; West was a producer on Jay-Z's original The Blueprint album in 2001 before he was a solo artist.
Released in July 2009, "Run This Town" was the first new music from Rihanna since
Chris Brown assaulted her the night of the Grammy Awards that February. She hadn't had an album out since
Good Girl Gone Bad in the summer of 2007, but she was still releasing singles and doing features. In 2008, she appeared with T.I. on "
Live Your Life" and with Maroon 5 on "
If I Never See Your Face Again."
"Run This Town" was the second single from
The Blueprint 3, following "
D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)." It went to #2 in October 2009, held back by The Black Eyed Peas' "
I Gotta Feeling," but another
Blueprint 3 single with a superstar singer - "
Empire State of Mind" (featuring Alicia Keys) - hit #1 in November.
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The Blueprint 3 is Jay-Z's 11th album, and his ninth consecutive album to debut at #1. In 2009, many listeners got their music from digital downloads, so the album was given a physical release on September 8, then released digitally at precisely 9:11 a.m. on September 11th.
The music video was filmed at the historic Fort Trotten Park in Queens, New York City and shows Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna performing in the midst of the kind of chaotic and tension-filled world you see in movies like The Warriors and Mad Max. It was directed by Anthony Mandler, who earned Jay-Z's respect with his work on the "Umbrella" video.
Mandler explained the concept to MTV News: "There's a tone and feeling to the song. There's a militia, a march and a kind of rambunctious energy to it that, for me, I immediately wanted to tap into. I showed [Jay] some references from the classic rebellious zones of the world. We live in a very orderly society in America, but when you get into Brazil, you get into the Middle East, you get into Africa, you get into Eastern Europe, when you get into places like that, there's a different sort of 'we run this town' [going on]. There's less order and more chaos. So we looked at a lot of those references, new photos and historical photos, to capture that kind of falling-apart feeling."
"Run This Town" topped out at #2 in America but it went to #1 in the UK, giving Jay-Z his first chart-topper there as a lead artist. Previously he'd featured on chart-toppers for Beyoncé ("
Deja Vu") and Rihanna ("Umbrella").
This samples the electric guitar loop from "Someday in Athens" by the '70s Greek band The Four Levels of Existence.
The artwork for The Blueprint 3 consists of a collection of white instruments piled together with three red horizontal lines over them. Jay-Z explained to MTV News that he chose to highlight the instruments on his cover because he felt they have been overlooked. "These things are like the forgotten pieces in hip-hop," he said. "It's still about music. It's not about radio, making gimmicks - it's still about making music. Those things are piled in the corner. These are the forgotten things about music. It's still about music. It's not about radio, it's not about making gimmicks, it's about music. The three stripes that everybody is asking about is made from the original [number] three. The first three they made on the wall was someone carving. If you look at [the number] 3, all they did was connect lines. The whole thing about this album, how I approached it, is that I wanted to make a new classic to start that all over again - to go back to making classic albums like the ones we grew up listening to."
At first, Kanye West argued against releasing this as a single, but when the song was played at a barbecue hosted by the DJ Enuff-led collective Heavy Hitters, it got a huge reaction that convinced Kanye it would be a hit.
Jay and his label were sued by TufAmerica Inc., who claimed that they illegally sampled the "Oh!" from the 1969 funk song "Hook & Sling" by New Orleans singer and pianist Eddie Bo. The re-issue label demanded in the copyright-infringement lawsuit royalties from "Run This Town" as well as other damages.
New York federal judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed TufAmerica's lawsuit on December 8, 2014. "The word 'oh' is a single and commonplace word," wrote the judge. "Standing alone, it likely is not deserving of copyright protection."
Eddie Bo's "Hook & Sling" has been sampled by a host of artists, including LL Cool J on "
Mama Said Knock You Out," Justin Timberlake on "
SexyBack" and Kanye West on "
Good Friday" and "
Lost in The World." TufAmerica previously sued West over the latter sample.
Jay-Z gets in a shout-out to a classic hip-hop duo in the lines:
Please follow the leader, So Eric B We are
Microphone fiend, it's the return of the god
"Microphone Fiend" and "Follow The Leader" are both tracks from Eric B. & Rakim.
Jay-Z was at the 2023 Super Bowl but he didn't participate in the halftime show, which was all Rihanna. She included "Run This Town" in her set of 12 songs, segueing into another Jay-Z collaboration, her hit "Umbrella."
