Art by DJ ShortThis coming weekend, Jay-Z will play a trio of shows at Yankee Stadium, one celebrating the 30th anniversary of his beloved debut album, Reasonable Doubt, another dedicated to The Blueprint, his signature album from 2001 that was somehow not written out of history despite dropping on the bloodiest day in his hometown’s modern history. (The third was dubbed “Extra Innings.”) Later this summer he’s got gigs in Paris and Los Angeles; in March he sat for an expansive interview with Frazier Tharpe at GQ. There’s a docuseries coming to HBO in the fall. Maybe something—an album, a full tour slate, a Super Bowl performance—is in the works; maybe this is, in fact, simply a celebration to mark the passage of time. In either case, we’re making the days leading up to those Yankee Stadium shows Jay-Z Week at POW. Later we’ll be publishing definitive essays on the two albums Jay will play in full this weekend; we’ll also be taking a look into the courtroom and ranking his solo LPs. Today, we present the 99 greatest Jay-Z songs, ranked and considered by some of the best critics alive today. 99. Empire State of Mind f/ Alicia Keysprod. Al Shux, Janet Sewell, and Angela HunteThe Blueprint 3 [2009]Jay’s the “new Sinatra”? Yeah right. But this June, opening a season of mega-watt New York pride—Knicks victory, a historic rent freeze, DSA’s primary sweep—the people decided. Right after the clock ran out on Game 5, the song spread through the city’s streets fast as a final-second tap-in at the hand of God. It was neither “N.Y. State of Mind,” nor “New York State of Mind,” nor “New York, New York”—it was the schmaltzy big-apple platitudes of CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OF THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO that no New Yorker was above. I was in Von King Park in Bed-Stuy, about 10 blocks from Marcy Houses, and three different congregations of hundreds if not thousands of people were screaming BIG LIGHTS WILL INSPIRE YOU NOW YOU’RE IN NEW YORK in an adrenaline-fueled deli