Jay-Z has said he wants his forthcoming memoirs to expose the intricacies of hip-hop in more detail.

As well as lift the lid on the rapper’s life, the book, entitled Decoded, also breaks down his lyrics.

In an interview with MTV, Jay-Z said he hoped the book would show that rap is “really poetry”.

“It's not just a bunch of guys putting rhyming words together,” he told MTV News. “There's thought behind it and there's cleverness and there's inspiration.

“There's social reason and there's political reason and there's angst and there's anger and all these different things inside music."

Decoded is due to be released on November 15.

Meanwhile, Jay-Z is also scheduled to release a new greatest hits collection next month.

(by Jason Gregory)