Jay Z Has the Room
Everyone knows Shawn “Jay Z” Carter is smart, talented, and wildly successful, his Roc Nation empire continually expanding: the new sports agency, a fragrance launch this month, a luxury-goods partnership with Barneys. What’s fascinating is the way a drug dealer turned rapper turned mogul and family man became the cultural force he is today—by claiming his past, and all it taught him. With unprecedented access, Lisa Robinson gets Jay talking about the rumors and the reality.
Everyone’s supposed to stay in their lines and be neat. You’re a rapper. You’re supposed to rap, carry a boom box, wear chains, and go to the club—that’s all you do. What are you doing collecting art? What are you talking about? Wait a minute, you’re getting out of the zone. People hate when people cross lines. —Jay Z
On June 18, the 40/40 Club, on West 25th Street, New York City, was jammed with basketball fans there to see the Miami Heat versus the San Antonio Spurs in Game Six of the N.B.A. finals. Downstairs, the sports bar was noisy with paying customers. Upstairs in his owner’s suite, Jay Z leaned back on one of the white leather sofas that line the large room. The noise in this room came from the game on two large flatscreen TVs and the loud camaraderie of Jay’s guests—most of whom are his closest friends, people who’ve been in his inner circle for years. Among them: Juan Perez, the president of the newly formed Roc Nation Sports; William “World Wide Wes” Wesley, a consultant to CAA Sports, which has recently partnered with Roc Nation Sports; Tyran “Ty Ty” Smith, a friend of Jay’s for 25 years and head of A&R for Roc Nation Records; and his longtime trusted publicist, Jana Fleishman. Jay wore a white T-shirt, black hoodie, jeans, and striped socks from the Stance sock company (he’s an investor). His white sneakers were in front of him on the floor.
So much more after the jump....
Two nights later, Game Seven, the same suite, more friends. On hand were Jay’s best friend, Emory Jones, who’s a partner in Jay’s clothing company; Chaka Pilgrim, head of creative visionary marketing for the Roc Nation conglomerate; John Meneilly, from Jay’s management team; and former Def Jam Records executive Kevin Liles. More food, more drinks, more yelling at the screens. D’Ussé, Jay’s preferred brand of Cognac, was served. Cash-money bets were discussed. Cigars were discussed. Jay showed me the “Shawn Carter” watch he designed for Hublot, which will cost somewhere around $20,000 and will be out later this year. Jay shouted at the screens, calling various players various nicknames: The Heat’s Shane Battier became “Bang Bang” Battier! One of the Spurs guards—who was having a terrible series—was “Apple Turnover!” The actor Jamie Foxx stopped by. (Later, Foxx told me that when his father got out of “mandatory college” [jail] the first concert he took his father to see was Jay Z’s in Miami. “It was after 9/11,” Foxx said, “and the city had just stopped still. But Jay just brought everyone together. My father cried.”)
In music, we love the idea of the screwed-up, shooting-up, fucked-up artist. The one bleeding in the garret having cut his own ear off. Jay Z is a new kind of 21st-century artist where the canvas is not just the 12 notes, the wicked beats, and a rhyming dictionary in his head. It’s commerce, it’s politics, the fabric of the real as well as the imagined life. —U2 lead singer Bono
On July 2, we were on the top floor in the private room of the Spotted Pig restaurant, in New York’s West Village. Along with chef Mario Batali, Bono, and others, Jay is an investor in the popular hangout. He wore a khaki Balmain shirt with an embroidered crest on the pocket. He was checking two phones and told me about the Samsung app that two days later would deliver his new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, for free to one million owners of Samsung Galaxy phones. Jana Fleishman and Chaka Pilgrim and the rapper J. Cole—who’s managed by Roc Nation and whose album Born Sinner was No. 1 that week—were there too. We talked about Kanye West and rap lyrics and Ice-T’s documentary, The Art of Rap.We discussed how in 2008, when Jay was set to perform at England’s Glastonbury Festival, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher was publicly disdainful of having a “hip-hop” act on the bill, so Jay went onstage and sang the Oasis hit “Wonderwall” to the delight of the crowd. Jay asked me many questions about the music and art scene in New York in the 1980s, when Debbie Harry and rap pioneer Fab Five Freddy and Madonna and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat all hung out together. (I chose not to dispel his romantic myths.) The conversation was all over the place: he said he never went swimming as a kid, but now he’s learned how to swim so he can teach his daughter—18-month-old Blue Ivy—whose picture popped up on his phone. He said he’s been learning to play tennis with a trainer. We discussed how his native Brooklyn has changed. He told me about Frankie’s restaurant and a pizza spot he won’t name that he says he goes to every Sunday. I asked Jay how he feels about the artisanal pickle and mayonnaise stores that populate the borough, and he laughed, recalling a recent walk he took with someone who lauded the merits of an ice-cream store on a street that Jay said was a dangerous one in his youth. Several bottles of a very good wine were consumed, and dinner orders were placed: radish salads and hamburgers. Jay had fish. I told him that the other sports agents seem terrified now that he’s getting into that business. “They should be,” he said, then added, “I really want to help these athletes. I do it anyway; they all come to the 40/40; we’ve been giving them advice for years. Do you know how many athletes go broke three years after they stop playing? I want to help them hold on to their money. I mean, I know about budgets. I was a drug dealer.”
Today, Shawn “Jay Z” Carter, 43, is a son, brother, husband, father, entrepreneur, mogul, sports agent, rapper, performer, movie producer, author, nightclub owner, Broadway producer, festival organizer, watch designer, soundtrack and video-game executive producer, and art collector. This fall, he debuts a fragrance (Gold) and a cigar (Comador), and he’ll start a three-month, 49-city world tour. He will also partner with Barneys New York to sell luxury goods from the Shawn Carter Collection during the holiday season. (Twenty-five percent of the Barneys proceeds will benefit his foundation, which provides scholarships to students facing socio-economic hardships.) Since the release of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, in 1996, Jay Z has built an empire and changed the culture. He’s put out 18 albums, with sales of 75 million copies worldwide. He has collaborated with artists that include Kanye West, Eminem, Nas, Rihanna, Alicia Keys, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Justin Timberlake, and Mary J. Blige—who says, “Jay is an amazing talent, and one of the smartest people I’ve met in the music business.” He was a part owner of the Nets basketball team and instrumental in bringing them to Brooklyn, getting the Barclays arena built, and designing the Nets’ logo as well as the $600,000 “Vault” luxury suites in the place. In 2007 he sold his Rocawear clothing company for $204 million, and in 2008 made a $150 million deal with Live Nation—which he told me he recently re-upped.
His life was not always like this.
Shawn Carter grew up in the Marcy Houses—Brooklyn projects that are four and a half miles from where he currently lives in Tribeca. The Marcy projects take up six blocks along Flushing and Nostrand Avenues in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Dozens of numbered brick buildings make up the complex, which, on a late-summer-afternoon visit, is almost eerily quiet. Bags of garbage are on the ground alongside the fences. An ambulance waits outside one of the buildings. Despite the trees and the playgrounds within the fenced-in complex, it is a bleak, sad place. A boy who appears to be around eight years old rides a bicycle, a group of old women sit chatting on a bench, and some teenagers just hang out. There is a palpable sense of utter hopelessness; no one who lives here can escape the fact that they live in government-subsidized public housing. Forget someone becoming an iconic, global superstar or a multi-millionaire—to even get out of here at all takes something extraordinary, almost a miracle.
When he was growing up there, Shawn liked to spray water from fire hydrants, play basketball, ride bicycles. In sixth grade he had a crush on his teacher, who told him he was smart. He loved to read. At home, he wrote down rhymes, listened to—and imitated—Michael Jackson, and watched Soul Train. His house was filled with music from his parents’ record collection; he says it was the party house. When Shawn was 11, his father’s brother was stabbed and died; his father turned to drugs and left the family. Shawn became withdrawn and, for a long time, wouldn’t allow himself to get close to anyone. As a teenager he started to deal drugs. When Jay and I talked at length about his youth, his life as a drug dealer, and his rags-to-riches story, I asked what got him out, what helped him survive. “Music,” he said.
At the end of the day, there is an itch that he constantly will want to scratch, and that itch is at the heart and center of hip-hop. I first heard “Picasso Baby” [Jay’s song, from the Magna Carta Holy Grail album] at 3:12 A.M., standing outside of a 7-Eleven in Philadelphia. Some guy had his phone hooked up to his car speakers and 12 of us were frozen, like we were our grandparents staring at the radio listening to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. I’m beyond certain that this is why he still does it—knowing somewhere in this world someone is staring at the speakers in analytical mode. —Roots drummer Questlove
The Roc Nation offices occupy the entire top floor of a large Manhattan office building a few blocks from Madison Square Garden in what used to be the Garment District. It was July 19, the day of Jay’s Yankee Stadium “Legends of the Summer” show with co-billed Justin Timberlake, and the office was abuzz. Jay and Beyoncé were in Jay’s glass-walled office, and Jay was holding his daughter. The walls of the offices are lined with art from Jay’s own collection (including several Basquiats) and photos of Roc Nation artists, including Shakira, Rihanna, Santigold, Rita Ora, and the Ting Tings. The offices also house the showroom of the Rocawear clothing line and producer-musician Pharrell Williams’s Billionaire Boys Club clothing line, now a part of Rocawear. Several hours later, backstage at Yankee Stadium in a large hospitality suite, Jay’s guests included model Jessica White and the Knicks’ Kenyon Martin, but it was more friends and family than a bunch of celebrities. Jay’s mother, Gloria Carter—who runs his Shawn Carter Foundation—was there, along with other relatives. On the field, Justin Timberlake’s V.I.P. guest platform had 14 people seated on chairs watching the show, while Jay’s V.I.P. guest platform was jam-packed with more than 50 friends and no chairs. It was one of the hottest days of the summer—upwards of 95 degrees. Beyoncé was on the platform, wearing shorts and a tank top, and she tied her long hair up. She told me her daughter was backstage, and she laughed when she said that her child prefers Jay’s music to hers. Watching Jay onstage, I realized how much pleasure he still takes in the actual act of rapping and performing—understandable, as he’s one of the very best. He’s got a total command of phrasing, and his syncopated lines can often sound like great scat singing. He has a dry sense of humor; there are so many funny lines in so many of his songs that they can fly by if you don’t really pay attention. Occasionally he raps in a syntax that is so effortlessly sophisticated (“Do I, to you, look like a lame who … ”) that it evokes a songwriter like Cole Porter. Jay famously makes up rhymes on the spot, in the recording studio, and doesn’t write them down. Everyone who has seen him do this likens it to a magic trick. “He sits in the back of the recording studio and listens to the track over and over again,” said Rick Rubin, who produced Jay’s hit “99 Problems.” “He’s so quiet and still during this process that it’s easy to forget he’s in the room. Then, after about 20 or 30 minutes, he jumps up and says, ‘I got it,’ and runs into the vocal booth to catch the recording while it’s fresh. He does several performances and each one is different. One can liken it to a solo by a jazz artist where there is a particular melody, but each version of it is phrased differently with different accents and high points.”
Jay says one of his nicknames—Hova—came about because of this process. People were always amazed that he didn’t write things down—they started saying it was unbelievable, like Jehovah. J-Hova. It was a joke. When Kanye said it on a record, it stuck. The initial Jay Z nickname came about because kids used to call him “Jazzy” when he started rapping in a circle in the Marcy projects. (He also says that the diamond sign he makes with his hands was another joke that began in his office; he started doing it at concerts, and the next thing he knew, the whole crowd did it.)
During a break in Jay’s set, Beyoncé and I went backstage. Blue Ivy, in the hallway with a nanny, reached her arms out for her mother to hold her. The child has huge eyes and is adorable—wearing a little cap-sleeved, scoop-necked white dress with a ruffle at the waist, orangey-red sneakers, and a red print bow in her hair. In Jay’s dressing-room lounge, she sat on her mother’s lap and played with puzzles with some other children. This would be, for anyone, a fairly normal family tableau, except that the father of the child in this picture was, at that very moment, singing “Young Forever” to a crowd of 60,000 people and dedicating the song to Trayvon Martin.
Later, Jay talked to me about the Trayvon Martin tragedy. “The thing is, that was not [just] a black kid,” he said. “That’s someone’s child, period. How they won that trial was they played on America’s fear of black people. Still. What if this guy comes in your neighborhood? You want him out of your neighborhood, right? They did a good job of taking the thing of ‘This could be your child’ away and [instead] played on the fear that some black guy could come in your neighborhood and rob the neighborhood. We’re going backwards right now. Because we need to deal with it in a real way. Not put a Band-Aid on it. Not put more police in the projects. If we don’t improve the education process, it’s not going to work.”
Several weeks after Yankee Stadium, Jay and I sat down and talked for almost three hours at Jungle City Studios, in Midtown Manhattan. I asked about his earlier remark: that he had to know about budgets to make drug deals. “To be in a drug deal,” he said, “you need to know what you can spend, what you need to re-up. Or if you want to start some sort of barbershop or car wash—those were the businesses back then. Things you can get in easily to get out of [that] life. At some point, you have to have an exit strategy, because your window is very small; you’re going to get locked up or you’re going to die.”
“That whole crack era, the Reagan years, it was everywhere,” he continued. “It just engulfed you. Music and drugs exploded in 1988. We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we’d pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off. We weren’t starving—we were eating, we were O.K. But it was things like you didn’t want to be embarrassed when you went to school; you didn’t want to have dirty sneakers or wear the same clothes over again. And crack was everywhere—it was inescapable. There wasn’t any place you could go for isolation or a break. You go in the hallway; [there are] crackheads in the hallway. You look out in the puddles on the curbs—crack vials are littered in the side of the curbs. You could smell it in the hallways, that putrid smell; I can’t explain it, but it’s still in my mind when I think about it.”
“My first album didn’t come out until I was 26. So I was really a fully developed man, but my whole life [before that] from 15, 16 … was really hard-core.” He says his mother knew he was dealing drugs, “but we never really had those conversations. We just pretty much ignored it. But she knew. All the mothers knew. It sounds like ‘How could you let your son … ’ but I’m telling you, it was normal… I was in Trenton, New Jersey, away from my mother for months. I was on the road, and that actually saved me from a lot of things, because I wasn’t in front of my mother’s house. Most kids were in front of their apartment buildings dealing drugs. Marcy Projects was a danger zone then. So a lot of friends that grew up doing that got killed or went to jail. That’s why The Wire resonates with people so much; it was a real depiction of most people’s lives. Most people don’t make that much money selling drugs, but everyone thinks that they could be the one that really makes it and gets successful. And I did, because when you went to Trenton, the prices doubled and tripled. So I was more successful than the guy who stood in front of the apartment building.”
“There were a lot of things that I lived in the street that helped me in the music business,” Jay said. “I knew what characters not to have around me. Sometimes it’s the people around you—whether they want to impress you or they’re still in that life—they’re hotheaded. It’s really the entourage that can be the problem.” Jay said he sold crack but never used it, and when I asked if he ever felt guilty about contributing to what was becoming an epidemic, he said, “Not until later, when I realized the effects on the community. I started looking at the community on the whole, but in the beginning, no. I was thinking about surviving. I was thinking about improving my situation. I was thinking about buying clothes.”
He said the reason there’s so much bragging and flaunting of material possessions in rap songs is that “we celebrate small victories. When you’re accustomed to wealth, you don’t show it, right? That’s why the white kids in school could wear bummy sneakers; it’s almost like, Don’t show wealth—that’s crass. But the other way around, for us, we were broke, and we wanted to pretend we weren’t.” I asked if he started wearing big gold chains again because it’s ironic, or he likes the way it looks. “It’s really ironic to me and I like the way it looks. It’s just really cool to me.”
Jay said that toward the end of his drug-dealing days “it was harder for me to just walk away. I had to really make a hard decision and say I’m going to try to make this music work. I was trying to do both. Nothing good comes when you’re dabbling in both of those worlds. I didn’t have any success in the beginning [with music] because I didn’t commit fully. I need to commit fully to something or it just won’t work.” When Jay committed fully to music, at first he couldn’t get a record deal. He and his then partner, promoter Damon Dash, formed Roc-a-Fella Records and went through a few independent record companies before signing with Def Jam. Early in his career, when he’d achieved some notoriety, he was involved in a nightclub altercation that resulted in an arrest for assault. Today, he says, “I did wrong and I paid. You’ve got to realize where I’m coming from; we fought all the time. It’s just what you did. You went to the club; you had fights; sometimes bottles got thrown, sometimes knives came out. You know how many times I had that sort of fight? I still had the bravado of the same guy I was, and I had to realize that I wasn’t that same guy anymore.”
But, he acknowledges, “you enter the room, your résumé enters with you. So [even now] every time I enter a room, it’s still that thing of: ‘That’s Jay Z—he used to be the drug dealer from Marcy Projects.’ But I have great people around me. I have family and friends and a strong foundation around me. Everything else, everything outside of who you really care about or who you really connect to, people’s perceptions of you, is just noise. You can’t pay attention to the noise, or live your life by the gossip columns, because it’ll drive you crazy.”
I asked Jay a lot of questions about rumors that he has not previously talked about—rumors that fit into what he calls the “noise” category. His trip to Cuba last April, for example, when he and Beyoncé were criticized for having had some sort of special White House clearance to get into that country. (President Obama even said, jokingly, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “I’ve got 99 problems and now Jay Z is one.”) According to Jay, “No one has to get White House clearance to go to Cuba; it was just a news story for that week. What we did was not unusual. The restaurant we went to [there] was filled with people’s pictures. When I tell you everyone’s been to this restaurant—I’m not going to say who—but the walls are littered with pictures of celebrities. They don’t bother anybody … so why was it us? It was just the timing. I think news stories now, sadly, are not about the news. They’re about ratings; they’re about hooks. So they found a hook: Obama’s buddies go to Cuba, bang, and they found a way to tie these two together. You notice the people that first came out [about this] were Republicans.”
As for Beyoncé’s not really having been pregnant with their first child, Jay says, “I don’t even know how to answer that. It’s just so stupid. You know, I felt dismissive about it, but you’ve got to feel for her. I mean, we’ve got a really charmed life, so how can we complain? But when you think about it, we’re still human beings. And this is a time like … forget Beyoncé, forget the person—a mother carrying her first child, and this is the thing they have to deal with? Certain things should be off-limits. I have thick skin, I understand; I go outside, you want to take my picture, fine. But there should be some kind of human-decency boundaries. This is a mother with a child. And even in hip-hop, all the blogs—they had a field day with it. I’m like, We come from you guys, we represent you guys. Why are you perpetuating this? Why are you adding fuel to this ridiculous rumor?”
When I brought up Beyoncé’s lip-synching at the inauguration, he was quick to defend his wife. “Well, if she couldn’t sing,” he laughed, “then it would be a big deal. I’d understand that. But there are certain things technically that you don’t want to have to deal with. This is about a president coming into office. It’s not about a performance. They’re not really set up to professionally have someone sing with the wind … with a new orchestra, microphone feedback. . . . There’s a million things that can go wrong. It isn’t like she did not sing. The track that was playing was the track that she sang the night before.” I mentioned that Whitney Houston lip-synched at the 1991 Super Bowl, the one everyone says was the best rendition of all time. “I never wanted to bring that up,” Jay said. “So you said it. I didn’t.” (I said that no one brings it up because she died, and people would think it’s disrespectful to speak ill of the dead, whom they then turn into saints or martyrs. I said it. He didn’t.)
I asked if he and Beyoncé were dating when they both posed for the group photo for the cover of the 2001 Vanity Fair Music Issue. “No, no, we weren’t,” he said. “We were just beginning to try to date each other.” Try? “Well, you know, you’ve got to try first,” he said. “You got to dazzle … wine and dine.” Did he pursue her? “Of course,” he said. I ask what if he hadn’t been Jay Z—say he was a gas-station attendant and she pulled up … would he have been able to date her? “If I’m as cool as I am, yes,” he said with a laugh. “Of course. But she’s a charming southern girl, you know, she’s not impressed But I would have definitely had to be this cool.” On his latest album, there’s a line: “She was a good girl ’til she knew me.” Is that about Beyoncé? “Yeah,” he said. So, she’s not a good girl anymore? “Nah,” he laughed. “She’s gangsta now.”
Everyone who knows Jay talks about how he inspires people. “We love him because of who he is,” Rick Rubin says, “not just because of his music. He is relevant because of the person he is, the artist he is, more so than the rapper he is. It’s his point of view and his ever expanding interest in the world that keeps him relevant. He is a shining light.” And, says Chaka Pilgrim, “Jay works every day to be the best person he can be. A lot of people want to be businesspeople because of Jay. So many people who don’t have an example of a father or a loving relationship—all of these things can affect generations to come. And it’s not because it’s a public-service announcement; it’s because this is where he is in his life.” According to the rapper Wale (pronounced Wah-lay), “Jay laid the blueprint to progress, to be a great businessman and a family man. No one [in the hip-hop community] was publicly dating, then getting married, then having kids. It’s commendable. I’m so in awe of the way he influenced a culture that’s been built around machismo.”
Knicks all-star Carmelo Anthony says, “Jay’s always been a guy I respected. I can truly relate to his evolution as a person and a businessman. He moves at his own pace, and when he strikes, he changes the game.” And L.A. Clippers all-star point guard Chris Paul says, “You can’t get any bigger than Jay is, but he’s so real, and for me, he’s always been a mentor. We could be talking, he’ll just listen, and then he always finds a way to teach. Anything he puts his mind to—just watch out.” And clearly, Jay has put his mind to Roc Nation Sports—which has already signed Oklahoma City Thunder all-star Kevin Durant, W.N.B.A. rookie Skylar Diggins, the Yankees second-baseman Robinson Cano, Jets quarterback Geno Smith, and the New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz. Michael Wilbon, ESPN’s N.B.A. analyst and co-host of Pardon the Interruption, says, “Every move Jay Z has ever made has been gold and this will be too.” And according to ESPN’s First Take co-host and basketball insider Stephen A. Smith, “When Jay Z is coming, he’s not tippytoeing; he stomps. He’s about making money, but he doesn’t need these athletes’ money. They’ve all reached out to him for his counsel, and he’s given it willingly. You’re going to listen to him because he’s done it, and he’s not scared to fail, because nothing could be worse than where he came from.” But, Smith adds, “I know a lot of people who are incredibly threatened by Jay’s presence in this [sports agency] business. And they should be.”
“Who better to share their life experiences and their wisdom with athletes than Jay Z?” says Leon Rose, head of basketball for CAA Sports, now partnered with Roc Nation Sports. John Meneilly says that any skepticism about Jay’s ability to oversee the sports agency is ridiculous. “Let’s analyze what it is,” he says. “There’s negotiating a contract with a team; Jay’s negotiated a lot of contracts in his life. Another part of that business is branding and marketing and endorsements, and if you can’t say that Jay is an expert in that area, you have no idea what is going on in the world. The third part is life-coaching, being a mentor—and again, he’s fantastic at that.” According to William “World Wide Wes” Wesley, Jay Z is a symbol of hope. “Jay Z is a natural-born star who has risen from the darkness of hopelessness, poverty, and racism,” he says. “Those who look to him can find guidance and direction. He says in his song [“Tom Ford”], ‘I don’t pop Molly, I rock Tom Ford.’ Imagine a rapper encouraging the youth not to focus on drug use, but to be successful enough to have the best of fashion and the good things in life.”
As for Tom Ford being a metaphor for success, the designer himself says when he first heard the song, “It flipped me out completely. The Tom Ford in the song is, of course, not me, but the persona I have created. As for the message, I like to think that it means that Jay doesn’t need to do drugs because he gets high from wearing my clothes. I find Jay completely captivating, smart, quick, well read, and, most of all, incredibly spiritual and grateful.”
During our talk at Jungle studios, Jay said the sports agency “just evolved. All the athletes came through New York, came to the 40/40; we’d give them advice and we’d put them with great people. I was like, Where are your agents? And—this is a real quote—one of those guys said to me, ‘I haven’t seen my agent since I signed my contract, seven years ago.’ Or a guy’s mother says she’s never even met the agent. In some cases they go through the family, but then again, it’s like: go through the family, charm the mother, tell her stuff … get him a car, and then … gone. Actually hoping to get fired so they can collect on the contract. This attitude that if you do one thing well you can’t do something else well is paralyzing for some people—but not for me. If people think that I only make music, they’re underestimating me. I’ve been a successful businessman my whole career. I can do more than one thing at one time. I can walk and chew gum.”
Jay said he knows to the penny how much money he has—but won’t divulge the amount. When told that Forbes estimated his net worth at around $500 million, he dismissed that as a “guesstimate.” I asked if he’s obsessed with making more money. “No, no,” he said. “I’m not motivated by that. I’m motivated by things I’m interested in. I like watches, so at some point [I’m] going to try and make a better watch. I was in the clothing business—I tried to make better clothes. Whether I succeed or not, that’s for people to judge. But I create things. I don’t sit around with my friends and talk about money, ever. On a record, that’s different.” And he admits that he still loves to rap. “I know I said I wouldn’t be doing it when I was 30, so that’s how I know I love it. Thirty years old was my cutoff, but I’m still here, 43 years old.”
Jay met Barack Obama when he was a senator; Obama’s “body man” Reggie Love was a fan and got them together at a dinner at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City. When Obama brushed dirt off his shoulder during the 2008 presidential campaign in an obvious reference to Jay’s song (“Dirt Off Your Shoulder”), Jay was amazed. “I was like, This is not happening in the world. This is not happening in America. It actually renewed my spirit for America. It was like, Oh, wow, man, this whole thing about land of the free, home of the … it’s, like, real—it’s going to happen, everyone’s getting to participate in it.
“But growing up, if you had ever told a black person from the hood you can be president, they’d be like, I could never … If you had told me that as a kid, I’d be like, Are you out of your mind? How?” When I asked him if the only way black kids thought they could get out of the projects was by being a rapper or a basketball player, Jay said, “Exactly. That’s the only thing we saw. Now we see different. We see … he’s a businessman, I don’t have to make music—I could do this or I can do that.”
But he added, “The middle class has been eliminated; it’s so hard to make a living now. There’s a bigger gap between the haves and have-nots, and that’s what creates the problem. It’s going to bring some sort of anger, it’s going to boil over, and there’s going to be a conflict. Everyone has to participate in this American Dream, and if everyone’s not participating, then there’s a problem. It’s not cool—the trajectory that this is going. We have to figure out how to include everyone.”
The day after my talk at Jungle studios, I joined Jay, Chaka Pilgrim, John Meneilly, Roc Nation A&R vice president Lenny Santiago, Emory Jones, and Jay’s longtime friend music executive Lyor Cohen at Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, for a trip to Baltimore and another one of the 14 “Legends of the Summer” stadium shows. We were delayed for hours due to weather, so Jay and I sat in the back of the Falcon jet and talked during the wait on the tarmac and throughout the flight. I told Jay that Beyoncé had said their daughter, Blue, liked her father’s music more than her mother’s. “That’s not true,” he said. “She does like her mother’s music—she watches [Beyoncé’s concerts] on the computer every night. But my album came out and I don’t know if Blue ever heard any of my music prior to this album—she’s only 18 months old and I don’t play my music around the house. But this album was new, so we played it. And she loves all the songs. She plays a song and she goes, ‘More, Daddy, more … Daddy song.’ She’s my biggest fan. If no one bought the Magna Carta[album], the fact that she loves it so much, it gives me the greatest joy. And that’s not like a cliché. I’m really serious. Just to see her—‘Daddy song, more, Daddy.’ She’s genuine, she’s honest, because she doesn’t know it makes me happy. She just wants to hear it.”
I asked about allegations in the media that he and Beyoncé trademarked their daughter’s name to do a line of baby clothes. Jay said they did it merely so no one else could. “People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name. It wasn’t for us to do anything; as you see, we haven’t done anything. First of all, it’s a child, and it bothers me when there’s no [boundaries]. I come from the streets, and even in the most atrocious shit we were doing, we had lines: no kids, no mothers—there was respect there. But [now] there’s no boundaries. For somebody to say, This person had a kid—I’m gonna make a fuckin’ stroller with that kid’s name. It’s, like, where’s the humanity?”
He raps on his new album about wanting to take his daughter for a walk or go to a store. Still, he admitted to me that he doesn’t have to go buy food himself, he doesn’t need to bring in his own dry cleaning, and he has the good fortune to not have to go into a Duane Reade. When asked if he has a New York City subway MetroCard, he said, “No, I don’t. When I went to ride the train last year to go to my concert in Brooklyn, I asked Emory for … Emory,” he called out, “what’s that thing I asked you for when we were on the train?” Emory answered back: “A token.”
‘Iwant to change—I want to try new things,” Jay said. So when Samsung paid Jay $5 million for one million copies of his new album to give away with a free app, it was an innovative experiment in maintaining control of the album’s marketing. And also being paid, when the album would otherwise have been leaked online for free through the CD manufacturing-and-delivery process. Then, there was a kerfuffle about how hard it was to download, and complaints that the app was invasive. According to Jay, “You don’t know all the things that it takes to make these things work. It’s very hard to foresee something when you do it for the first time. I didn’t know until I tried to get the app, and [then I realized] that it was a lot to do. And so many people tried to get it at once, it crashed.” As for its being invasive, Jay listed a bunch of other apps that he says all require the same information. “Your credit card on Apple is invasive,” he said. “Someone has your fuckin’ credit card. Your phone, you turn it on … well, not your phone,” he said (eyeing my flip phone from the previous century), “but the average person’s phone—there’s a G.P.S. on it. Whether it’s on or off, they know where the phone is.”
I asked Jay what he considered his biggest accomplishment, and he replied, “Staying grounded and [being] a sane person is my biggest accomplishment.” He said that his biggest initial music goal was to have an album and go gold. “The next one was to build a company and to represent the culture and change the perception of artists. It became more of a ‘Let’s change the perception of rapper turned businessman; let’s show people that you can be a player-coach.’ And you can be successful at it. You can show a different example of how it ends. It usually ends on one of those ‘Where Are They Now’ specials. Let’s show a different ending.”
L. A. Reid, who was the chairman of Def Jam Records during Jay’s three-year tenure as president of the label, says, “Jay’s a very smart guy—the fact that he was at Def Jam made it a very sexy company. It was like having Frank Sinatra down the hall.”
Questlove says, “When Jay joked about Hush Puppies in 1997, everyone stopped rocking Puppies. Then he single-handedly stopped us all from driving a 4.0 Range Rover with one song. So I told him, Whatever you say, people take it as gospel. So I said, I want you to go to college!! I had the plan all laid out—we would both go to Princeton. I told him if he makes college education cool the whole world will follow. He laughed so hard and said, ‘Dude, people go to college to get a job. I have the best job in the world already.’ But you mark my words: he will be addressed as Dr. Shawn Carter before he leaves this earth. He rolls his eyes at me, but I know he’s addicted to climbing mountains.”
Some of Jay’s notable lyrics are “Only rapper to re-write history without a pen,” “On to the next one / Somebody bring me back some money please,” and, on his most recent album, “Let me be great.” The last thing I asked Jay before we got off the plane in Baltimore to go to the stadium was: When you’re up on top of that mountain, where else is there to go? “There’s always another mountain,” he said.
On to the next one. Let him be great.
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