Empire State of Mind

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “So when did you first meet Jay-Z?” I begin. “Do you remember the first interaction?”

  Kent purses his lips and exhales.

  “This was when he was about fifteen,” he says. “In the Marcy projects. I heard him rap that day, and it was incredible.”

  “When did you realize that this guy was the next big thing?”

  “I realized it back then,” he says. “Whenever he rapped with anybody, he outclassed them so bad that I knew it was only a matter of time. I’m no genius for thinking he was incredible, you know what I’m saying? I just saw it early. And I just wanted to do what I could to make it right.” The waiter brings out our margaritas, and Kent pauses to take a sip.

  “When you grow up in the hood, fast money is all you can think of because of the pressure,” he says. “You’re in a building with five hundred people when you could be in a house with four. You want to get out. You do whatever you can to get out.”

  Born on December 4, 1969, Shawn Corey Carter eased his way out of the womb only to start his life in one of Brooklyn’s roughest sections. “He was the last of my four children, the only one who didn’t give me any pain when I gave birth to him,” says his mother, Gloria Carter, in a spoken-word interlude on Jay-Z’s Black Album. “And that’s how I knew that he was a special child.”

  Within a few years, neighbors in the perilous Marcy Houses were beginning to share that view. At age four, an impatient Jay-Z taught himself how to ride a two-wheel bicycle. He caused a stir when he rode it down the street unaided. “I rode this ten-speed, it was really high,” he said in a 2005 interview. “But I put my foot through the top bar, so I’m ridin’ the bike sideways and the whole block is like, ‘Oh God!’ They couldn’t believe this little boy ridin’ that bike like that. That was my first feeling of being famous right there. And I liked it. Felt good.”1

  Jay-Z’s earliest taste of music came around the same time. “My first musical memory had to be, my mom and pop had like a huge record collection,” Jay-Z explained at the beginning of the mini-documentary NΥ-Z . “They used to have these parties and [my siblings and I] couldn’t come in the front room, so we had to stay in the back. I remember always sneaking out in my pajamas and watching everybody dancing. I mean, we had every record that was out. My mom and pop had great musical taste. . . Michael Jackson, early Jackson Five, Prince early albums, Commodores, Johnson Brothers [sic], Marvin Gaye. . . that’s soul music.”2

  Had his family maintained this idyllic milieu, Jay-Z might have been on his way to a stellar academic career. “I knew I was witty around the sixth grade,” he explained. “I just had that feeling of being smart. We did some tests in the sixth grade, and I was on a twelfth-grade level. I was crazy happy about that. When the test scores came back, that was the first moment I realized I was smart.”3

  But in 1980, Jay-Z’s father, Adnis Reeves, abandoned his wife and children. Reeves first left with the goal of tracking down the man who fatally stabbed his brother,4 but became so consumed with the notion of revenge—and later, by addiction to alcohol and drugs, most notably heroin5—that his departure became permanent, leaving Gloria and the children to fend for themselves. For the young Jay—Z, the effects were instantaneous. He was, in his own words, “a kid torn apart once his pop disappeared.” His grades declined, and not even his mother could get through to him.6

  “His pops left when he was like ten,” says Clark Kent, whose own father departed when he was a youngster. “That’s when you’re already believing your father’s a superhero, or your father’s the best guy in the whole world. And then he leaves, and all of those things become things that hurt you, and make you want to become more into yourself or become more reclusive. And, you know, those things weigh on you.”7

  Jay-Z turned to other male role models like Jonathan “Jaz-O” Burks, an up-and-coming Marcy-based rapper four years his senior. The two first met in 1984 when mutual friends tried to arrange a rap battle between Jaz-O and the young Jay-Z, who was just starting to gain a reputation as a talented lyricist himself. When Jay-Z arrived, the older rapper suggested something a bit less confrontational. “I was like, ‘Look, let him rhyme, it doesn’t have to be a battle,’ ” recalls Jaz-O over a telephone interview. “I saw he was a young kid. . . but when he rhymed, I heard something I’d never heard before . . . The cadence, the things that people may have as far as raw talent, but never really pay attention to, he had it.”8

  Almost immediately, the two became good friends. Some observers speculate that Jay-Z’s stage name is partly an homage to his mentor and partly a nod to the J and Z subway lines that stop near the Marcy housing projects (Jay-Z insists that his rap name is simply a shortening of his childhood nickname Jazzy, a notion confirmed by DJ Clark Kent). Regardless, Jaz-O’s influence was undeniable. Under the elder rapper’s tutelage, Jay-Z’s lyrics became wittier, his delivery faster, and his syncopation sharper.

  “I taught him basic poetic license, metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia—things that most rap artists would say to you, ‘What is that?’ ” remembers Jaz-O. “I taught him that in order to be the best, you don’t have to outwardly hone your craft. But in privacy, hone your craft. People don’t have to know how hard you work to get something.” Aside from musical guidance, Jaz-O and other friends helped provide Jay-Z with basic necessities when his single mother of four couldn’t. “I think quite honestly, his situation was a bit dire,” says Jaz-O. “He used to go to [his friend] Chase’s house often, just so he could eat. My house as well.”

  Even with Jaz-O’s companionship and guidance, Jay-Z remained stung by his father’s departure. In a rare moment of vulnerability, he told Rolling Stone that his father’s exit scarred him so badly that he started to distance himself emotionally from potentially hurtful situations. “I changed a lot. I became more guarded. I never wanted to be attached to something and get that taken away again,” he said. “I never wanted to feel that feeling again.”9

  In the ensuing years, the young Jay-Z indeed became troublingly detached. The worst manifestation of this occurred at age seventeen, when Jay-Z shot his drugged-out older brother in the shoulder for stealing a ring.10 He describes the incident on his second album: “Saw the devil in your eyes, high off more than weed / Confused, I just closed my young eyes and squeezed.”11

  Moments after he fired the shot, Jay-Z raced over to Jaz-O’s Marcy apartment and breathlessly explained what had happened. “He was like, ‘I shot my brother,’ ” recalls Jaz-O. “I was like, ‘What the fuck did you shoot him for?’ He’s like, ‘I told him to stop taking my stuff.’ He said it was kind of an accident. . . he was trying to scare [his brother], but the situation got kind of crazy, and he just happened to hit him in his arm.” Though Jay-Z’s brother was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, he never incriminated his younger sibling for the injury. In fact, the pair quickly reconciled, as Jay-Z explains in verse: “Still, you asked to see me in the hospital the next day / You must love me.”12

  Surprisingly, the young rapper’s actions didn’t result in any serious legal consequences. That may seem unusual, but in the early 1980s, Bedford-Stuyvesant was one of the many poor enclaves in New York that were largely neglected by the authorities. Hospitals were accustomed to admitting victims of stray shots, and Jay-Z’s brother didn’t want to incriminate a family member. “His brother didn’t press charges partly because his brother knew he was wrong,” says Jaz-O. “And, you know, they’re still brothers. For the most part, he felt to an extent that it was an accident. He understood that it was his little brother who couldn’t beat his big brother and was just trying to intimidate him.”

  The incident revealed a striking similarity between the adolescent Jay-Z and his absent father: an inability to control vengeful impulses. Adnis Reeves’s desire to track down his brother’s killer led him to abandon his family; Jay-Z’s need for retribution was so powerful that he shot his own brother. Perhaps the most compelling part of Jay-Z’s lyrical confession is his admission that, all along, he
was hoping his brother would try to talk him down (“Gun in my hand, told you step outside / Hoping you said no, but you hurt my pride”13). It shows a desire for the sort of discipline that he would eventually learn to impose on himself.

  Not surprisingly, unloading a bullet into his brother’s shoulder is a moment that Jay-Z would rather forget. In the rare cases when an interviewer brings it up, the rapper maneuvers away from the subject. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about that on TV, it’s not cool,” Jay-Z said in 2002. “That’s a bit over the line.”14 Indeed, firing that gun wouldn’t be the last time he allowed his desire for revenge to cloud his judgment. As Jay-Z admits in one of his songs, he “had demons deep inside that would raise when confronted.”15

  Despite the magnitude of Jay-Z’s struggles at home, few of his peers at Brooklyn’s George Westinghouse High School knew the extent of his struggles. “He was very quiet and dressed nice from what I remember,” recalls Carlos R. Martinez, who overlapped with Jay-Z at Westinghouse and currently works as a corrections officer in Brooklyn. “That’s about it.”16 The mogul-to-be was soft-spoken, except when he was rapping. “He was a clever rapper but not very into talking about it,” remembers Billy Valdez, a classmate who’s now a music producer in New Jersey. “He did his thing on the low, very humble.”17

  Jay-Z’s classmates were too busy dealing with their own problems to speculate on the home life of the quiet kid with a gift for rhyme. In those days, Westinghouse was among the most dangerous schools in New York. Salvador Contes attended Westinghouse at the same time as Jay-Z and went on to teach for thirteen years at the school. He remembers broken windows, smoky stairwells, and a general fear for one’s personal safety. “When you went into the boys’ bathroom, there were no lights. You’d walk in there, pitch-dark, and you knew things were going on in the bathroom, but you couldn’t see,” he says. “You didn’t want to take a chance. You could have gotten mugged in the bathroom, and you wouldn’t have known who did it. . . So you did your best to hold it.”18

  Jay-Z dodged danger by spending most of his time loitering in the school’s brightly lit cafeteria. There, he practiced his rap skills by freestyling to beats pounded out on the table. His classmates began to take notice. “You’d always see him in the same spot when you walked into the cafeteria, if you walked in on the left side,” Contes remembers. “Literally all the time.” There, he’d partake in verbal jousting matches with other aspiring rappers—Westinghouse alums include the Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes—while his classmates looked on. “It was always a battle on who was better,” says Contes. “It was almost disappointing when they didn’t do it.”

  Jay-Z never graduated from high school, thanks in part to the influence of childhood friend DeHaven Irby, who lived across the hall from him in the Marcy projects. The two boys walked to school together every day. They also frequented Brooklyn’s asphalt basketball courts. “He wasn’t aggressive,” recalls DeHaven, now a thickset ex-con, over milk shakes at Dallas BBQ in downtown Brooklyn. “He had a shot, but he wasn’t, like, a ballplayer. Seemed like he’d do a lot of studying before he’d make a move. I guess that works for him now.”19

  In 1988, DeHaven relocated to Trenton, New Jersey, to live with his aunt. His basketball coach at Westinghouse suggested he make the move so that he could play at the local high school in Trenton, which had a better program than Westinghouse. But DeHaven dropped out as soon as he saw the lucrative opportunities offered by drug dealing. With a business partnership in mind, he reached out to his old friend Jay-Z.

  “I was like, ‘Yo, I need you here with me, there’s money here, we can get this money,’ ” says DeHaven. “I had everything already laid out for him before he even came. I already had told everybody in Trenton about him. I used to tell them he was my [biological] brother.” 20

  So the eighteen-year-old Jay-Z started taking the train to Trenton on weekends. Eventually, DeHaven’s family got used to having him around; before long, he moved in full-time. Jay-Z’s mother didn’t stop him. “I was already out on my own at fifteen, sixteen years old,” says Jay-Z. “My mom didn’t put me out, but she did the best thing for me. She allowed me to search. She gave me a long leash.”21

  Jay-Z took that freedom and used it to start picking up what one might call a practical education. DeHaven taught Jay-Z everything he knew about the heady local drug market—as Jay-Z himself said, “DeHaven introduced me to the game”22—and soon he was on the streets selling cocaine. He developed a strict profit-making policy, one that the locals quickly noticed. “They knew he was about business,” remembers DeHaven. “No shorts, meaning he was getting all his money. All the money. If the product was ten dollars, you couldn’t get it for nine dollars. . . a lot of people thought of him as being stingy.”

  Even as he started getting involved in the drug trade, Jay-Z made time for music. In 1988, Jaz-O became the first rapper to land a deal with British label EMI. When the company flew him to London for two months to record his album, he brought along Jay-Z and a young producer named Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo, who’d go on to found Murder Inc., a record label that gained success and notoriety in the late 1990s. “I treated him and Irv as equals, but [Jay-Z] was basically my sidekick,” recalls Jaz-O. “It was his first exposure to traveling and doing things in the music industry.” Shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Jay-Z got his first real taste of luxury when he cruised to the London release party for Jaz-O’s album on New Year’s Eve in a Cadillac limousine.

  Upon returning to the United States, Jay-Z talked his way onto the tour bus of Big Daddy Kane, a successful rapper from hip-hop’s golden age in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A host of hip-hop luminaries joined Kane on tour, including Queen Latifah, MC Serch, Shock G, and a young Tupac Shakur. As a member of Kane’s posse, Jay-Z would sometimes go onstage during intermissions to entertain crowds with his spitfire freestyle delivery. Though Jay-Z today grosses over $1 million per show, he spent four months in 1989 working the hip-hop equivalent of an unpaid internship—rapping for room and board, which consisted of a spot on the tour bus floor and a free pass at the buffet.

  MC Serch, whose real name is Michael Berrin, recalls Jay-Z having to ask Kane for money to go to a local burger joint for dinner. His memories of Jay-Z were not that different from those of the young rapper’s high school classmates. “I just remember Jay having gold teeth in his mouth, having a big smile, not saying a lot. Jay wasn’t a big talker,” he says. “Kane rolled with the realest of the real dudes from Brooklyn. And Jay was just one of these young gunners that rolled with him.”23

  After the tour, Jay-Z found himself between worlds. Nearly twenty years old, he’d gotten a taste of the good life with Jaz-O in London, and he’d rubbed elbows with the biggest names in hip-hop on Big Daddy Kane’s tour. But he’d dropped out of high school, and his own musical career hadn’t gotten to a point where he could make serious money as an artist. So he picked up where he’d left off as a hustler. “I think he realized that in order to really push the music, you needed to be able to finance yourself,” says Jaz-O. “He chose to quite simply get money, as most of us did in our circle, we just chose to get money and get out of the hood any way we could.”

  Specifically, Jay-Z went back into business with DeHaven. From a supply and demand standpoint, the decision made a lot of sense. In the 1980s, New York was the main East Coast entry point for cocaine imports from South America. With ties in New York and Trenton, Jay-Z and DeHaven did what any shrewd businessmen would do with a growing enterprise: they expanded into undeveloped markets in Maryland and Virginia, where the competition was lighter and the clientele less sophisticated. “New York was the capital of drugs,” explains DeHaven. “This is where it came in, back then. So the further you were away from here, the higher [the price] goes.”

  Jay-Z would later use his music to boast that he wasn’t just selling $10 crack rocks on the corner. In “Takeover” he says, “I was pushing weight back in ’88,”24 a slang-driven lyric meant to emphasiz
e the magnitude of his dealings. “There wasn’t no nickel and diming around back then,” says DeHaven with a chuckle. “There was money in the streets. It wasn’t a recession. It was Reaganomics.”

  Even as Jay-Z’s partnership came to be interrupted by DeHaven’s intermittent prison stints, he continued moving back and forth between Brooklyn, Trenton, and locations farther south with the help of other associates—and the rise of a new and profitable product: crack cocaine. Dreamed up somewhere in Colombia during the mid-1980s, the process of creating crack could be completed by anyone with a coffeemaker, a hot plate, some cocaine powder, and a few common grocery items. If diluted with another additive like baking soda, a brick of cocaine powder could produce enough $10 crack rocks to quadruple a street dealer’s profits.25

  Though Jay-Z’s music admittedly “came second to moving this crack,”26 his collaborations with Jaz-O continued. In 1990, the pair released a song called “The Originators,” following it with a music video in which Jay-Z sports a Waldoesque red-and-white-striped shirt. Neither the blithe ballad nor the campy video delved into the grim urban subject matter that characterized both Jay-Z’s life at the time and much of his later work; on the contrary, “The Originators” evoked the playful boasts of early records like Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” What set Jay-Z apart as an artist was the sharpness and rapidity with which he delivered his lyrics; that verbal dexterity earned Jay-Z some attention in the underground hip-hop scene. It also served as a moneymaking alibi. With his underground and underworld profiles on the rise, Jay-Z would sometimes help his mother financially—or splurge on extravagances like gold teeth. In the song “December 4th” he says, “I hit my momma with cash from a show that I had, supposedly.” In other words, he was using unpaid musical appearances as a front to hide the fact that most of his money came from selling drugs.