They'll cost $22 apiece and the profits will reportedly flow partly to the one percent--that is, to the rapper himself

When Slate published a widely and justly derided article positing that the best album of the last decade was The Strokes' Is This It, I remember thinking, "But what is the best album?" Were I a more talented music critic, I'd have written about how Rolling Stone puts Jay-Z's The Blueprint in its top 5, but that The Grey Album, a mash-up of Jay-Z's The Black Album and The Beatles The White Album, is arguably the perfect standard bearer for the collaborative digital era. All of that is to say that I have much respect for Jay-Z as a hip hop artist. Even weeks after buying Watch the Throne, his recent collaboration with Kanye West, my guilty pleasure is the third track, "Otis." The lyrics are absurd. It's hard to see how it's any sort of tribute to Otis Redding. It's nevertheless what I've been blasting as I drive my girlfriend's Suzuki Verona down Highway 1.

But this news that the clothing company he co-founded, and in which he retains a stake, is going to sell Occupy Wall Street inspired T-shirts that say "Occupy All Streets"?

It's just too much.

I'm not the type to mix musical affinity and politics, nor to let the substance of lyrics get in the way of my enjoying a good song. "Under My Thumb" by The Rolling Stones? Fantastic. The Beatles singing "I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man"? Undeniably creepy, but still a good song. Jay-Z concluding an otherwise complimentary verse about Beyonce by rapping, "stop looking at her tits / Get ya own dog, ya heard, cuz that's my bitch"? Indefensible, obviously. And I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall for that dinner table negotiation. But I like the flow. And its appalled critics would too if they heard it in another language.