Jay Z
Jay
This man has got such a sweet and kind heart,” Beyoncé told Kim Wood Sandusky one night in a Manhattan hotel room. “He comes from a place of such compassion,” she said. Years later, Sandusky recalled, “As I was listening to her talking about Jay Z, I sat there thinking, ‘Okay, you know what? This man is going to be her husband.’ I think he was opening up her heart in a way she didn’t know was possible. Listening to the way she talked about him and seeing that sparkle in her eye, I knew something wonderful was unfolding in her life.”
If the old axiom that opposites attract is true, perhaps that’s one explanation as to how Beyoncé Knowles finally ended up with Shawn Carter, better known as Jay Z. Certainly they are from completely different worlds. She was raised middle-class in a relatively stable environment shielded from most problems by parents who—while they certainly had their own challenges—loved her and her sister unequivocally. By contrast, he was raised in a lower-income New York project called Marcy Houses (or Marcy Projects) in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York by his mother, Gloria Carter. While Beyoncé spent her youth performing with Girls Tyme in the protective, safe environments of Andretta Tillman’s home or that of her own parents, Shawn spent his childhood mixing in a tough neighborhood with gang members, drug addicts, and dangerous criminals. Beyoncé was raised Christian and is still religious. Jay has never claimed any sort of religious affiliation except for occasionally suggesting that he is a member of the Five-Percent Nation, a fringe organization founded in 1963 by Clarence 13X when he broke off from the Nation of Islam.
Shawn Corey Carter was the last of four children born to Gloria Carter and Adnis Reeves on December 4, 1969. Perhaps no one knows Jay like his childhood friend DeHaven Irby. “He lived across the hall from me in 5B,” Irby remembered. “We met at around the age of nine. It was the projects, so everyone was close. Our mothers, sisters, brothers were all friends. It was one household, that’s how we were raised. His mother, Gloria, was like my mother. Trust and loyalty stand out as to what kind of a person Jay was in my life. We played ball together, we did everything together. What I liked about him most was that you could depend on him.”
In 1980, when Shawn was about eleven, his father abandoned the family. “Anger. At the whole situation,” Jay Z told Oprah Winfrey when asked how he dealt with it. “Because when you’re growing up, your dad is your superhero. Once you’ve let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again. So I remember just being quiet and cold. Never wanting to let myself get close to someone like that again. I carried that feeling throughout my life.”
When Shawn was about twelve, he experienced a defining moment in his life. He shot his older brother Eric in retaliation for stealing trinkets from him in order to support his crack cocaine addiction. The rapper Jaz-O—who would soon take Shawn under his wing—explained: “Shawn said it was an accident; he was trying to scare Eric. But things got out of hand. He shot him in the arm. Eric didn’t press charges because he knew what he was doing, stealing from the family, was wrong. At the end of the day, they were still brothers. So, anyway . . . that was just a thing that happened. That ain’t Shawn. Can’t define Shawn by that shit.”
Ultimately Eric forgave Jay and didn’t press charges. Some in Jay’s life have speculated, though, that it was then that his moral compass became twisted, making him believe he was somehow above the law. From that point onward, he went into a downward spiral and soon began selling drugs with his buddy DeHaven Irby. In his song lyrics, Jay Z claims to have been shot three times. His education was not a priority; he didn’t graduate. “It was life during wartime,” he recalled of the time he left home as a teen and began to turn a profit in the drug trade. “I lost people I loved, was betrayed by people I trusted, felt the breeze of bullets flying by my head,” he said. “I saw crack addiction destroy families—it almost destroyed mine—but I sold it anyway.”
Eventually, Jay began to pay attention to the sounds of the city around him, the rapping of those on street corners whose messages about their lives were similar to his own experiences. His incessant drumming on the kitchen table at all hours of the night was what caused his mother to finally recognize his innate sense of rhythm. She bought him a boom box as a birthday gift. It was then that he began coming up with his own rhymes and lyrics, freestyling about his life in the ’hood. His friends began to call him “Jazzy,” a nickname that eventually evolved into “Jay-Z” (and, more recently, Jay Z, without the hyphen).
In the mid-1980s, Jay Z became a protégé of the rapper and record producer known as Jaz-O (Jonathan Burks) and began featuring on some of his earliest songs, such as “The Originators.”
“When I met him, he had just turned fifteen, about 1984,” Jaz-O recalled. “He was young, wet behind the ears. I was four years older and had just come back from two years of college. Everybody was sayin’ this young guy in the neighborhood was the best MC in the projects. Mutual friends set up this sort of battle between us, him and me rhyming against one another. Different aspects of him reminded me of myself. He was so good, so dope . . . his cadence; he had stuff going for him that he didn’t even know he had. He had raw talent. What I had was more polished. I also had knowledge of basic poetic license, metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, so all of that is what I taught Jay when we started writing together.”
When Jaz-O became the first rapper signed to the British EMI record label, he took Jay Z with him to the UK for a couple months as he recorded his debut album. “It was the first time Jay had been out of the country, the first time he experienced the record business,” recalled Jaz-O. “He started to get a taste of the high life, too, with limousines and expensive dinners. He saw how much money could be made in the business. He started to get it that he didn’t have to sell drugs for a living, that he had options.”
Jay Z says he officially stopped selling drugs after he almost lost his life in a deal gone bad—“three shots, close range, never touched me—divine intervention,” he has said. He added that “a fear of being nothing” made him reconsider his priorities; he didn’t want to turn around and find himself in his thirties, still running the streets and looking to score his next big deal. “I started seeing people go to jail and get killed, and the light slowly came on,” he recalled of his decision to leave the drug world behind at about the age of twenty. “I was like, this life has no good ending.”
After a couple more appearances on songs by other popular rappers, Jay Z released his official debut single, “In My Lifetime,” on the small label Payday in the summer of 1995. Once he started to become successful, he became less interested in maintaining a relationship with Jaz-O. “I couldn’t get him on the phone anymore,” said Jaz-O. “He began to surround himself with people who didn’t want me around. I’m allergic to bullshit, and there was a lot of it around him. I heard him telling people, ‘I came into the game on Jaz’s back,’ but at the same time he was hearing, ‘Why the hell do you even have Jaz around? Get rid of him!’ He did what he had to do. I get it. It’s a business. He was done with me. But I got an ego, too. So I was done with him as well. It was too bad we never really had a good conversation about it.”
Because of royalty issues with Payday, Jay Z started his own independent record label, Roc-A-Fella Records, with his friends Damon Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke. It has been said that no one believed in Jay like Damon; many people would go as far as to say that Damon actually “discovered” him (though, with all due respect, that honor should go to Jaz-O who Jay Z says actually tried unsuccessfully to sign with Rock-A-Fella). “Here was a guy with the same aspirations that I had,” Dash recalled. “All we talked about was making money and how to spend it, what the best of everything was and how bad we wanted it.”
In 1996, Jay Z released his first album, the critically acclaimed Reasonable Doubt, on the new label. The record went platinum and ushered in a new era
not only for rap in general but for Shawn Carter as well, who had suddenly become a much-heralded voice for the genre.
A year later, Carter issued In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, in which he revealed controversial aspects of his childhood and upbringing. It became a huge record, going to number three on the Billboard Top 200. It was followed in 1998 by Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life, another massively successful album, which sold over five million copies and won a Grammy. In 1999, he issued Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter, which sold another three million. Still, trouble seemed to follow him. In 1999, he was arrested for stabbing record executive Lance Rivera, who he believed had been bootlegging his music. He pled not guilty but later changed his plea to guilty of a misdemeanor. He was put on three years’ probation.
A year later, the rapper released The Dynasty: Roc La Familia, doubtless his most accessible and soulful album, and another major hit. It was also at about this time that Jay became godfather to DaHaven Irby’s firstborn, Christina. “It couldn’t have been anybody else,” Irby says, “that’s how close we were.” Jay took DeHaven to the hospital on a frigid Valentine’s Day evening, the night Christina was born. The two men held her in their arms for the first time.
After his string of hits, however, DaHaven felt that Jay began to distance himself from him. “I actually don’t know what happened,” Irby said. “He started surrounding himself with people who made it impossible for those of us who had been close to him to get in touch. Now he’s the godfather of Kanye [West]’s kid, and he acts like Christina isn’t in his life, and I guess she’s not because he’s disappeared from both of us. The responsibility of being a godfather is that if something happens to me you make sure my daughter is taken care of. I have had to accept that if something happened to me, Jay would not be there for Christina. I don’t know this Jay. I only know the one I grew up with, and it ain’t this one. I miss the guy I knew, that’s all I can say. I miss the guy I knew.”
“Look, this is just what happens,” observed Chad Elliott. Elliott, who would go on to cowrite and coproduce “Jumpin’ Jumpin’ ” for Destiny’s Child, happened to be a close friend of Jay’s and Jaz-O’s in these early days. At the time, he was a record executive who tried unsuccessfully to get Jay signed to Motown. “On his journey, Jay didn’t always take the necessary steps to remember who was with him at the beginning, who really mattered, and I’m not talking about just the guy in the studio one night who told him how great he was, but the guys who were key in his life,” he says. “But you have to understand, it’s a fast-moving train, and when you’re on it, it’s not easy to stop and consider every aspect of the ride. You’re just ridin’ as fast as you can. So, yes, some of the passengers get lost along the way. That’s just a fact, a consequence, if you will, of the road you have to travel to be successful in this business.”
Obviously, there are people in his life who feel let down by Jay, which is not unusual—as Chad Elliott points out—in the lives of people who came from nothing, forged relationships with friends of similar circumstances, and then went on to great success. Jay Z was never one to look back. He is nothing if not a self-invented man; nobody ever gave him anything, his success is hard-earned. To become a phenomenon in the record business, he implemented much of the same skill set that made him a successful drug dealer, such as his ability to read people and intuit the next, best course of action. He has also been incredibly philanthropic; untold millions of his have gone toward his charitable efforts. Along with his drive and ambition, he is a master media strategist. Nothing is ever left to chance when it comes to his public image. “He is always thinking two steps ahead of everyone else,” concluded Jaz-O. “If you think anything is ever an accident in terms of what you’re seeing from Jay Z, you’d be wrong.”
One night early in his career, Jay Z and Chad Elliott partied together in a nightclub in New Jersey. They left the club in the wee hours of the morning. Chad, the Motown executive, got into his Mercedes convertible, Jay, the rapper, in his white Lexus. The two pulled out onto a busy highway, and a short time later happened to end up stopped at a red light, side by side. They glanced at each other, took in each other’s luxury vehicles, smiled, and nodded their approval.
“Lookin’ good, my brother,” Chad said to Jay.
Jay grinned at him. “Dude, I’m just tryin’ to be like you,” he told him.
“Don’t worry about that, my brother,” Chad said, “because you’re gonna be so much bigger than me, it ain’t even funny, Jay. It ain’t even funny!”
With that, the light turned green, Jay Z stepped on the gas, pulled ahead of his friend . . . and was gone in a flash.
“’03 Bonnie & Clyde”
In the spring of 2002, Jay Z called the rapper Kanye West to ask him to come up with an idea for a possible duet with Beyoncé. Coincidentally, West had already been toying with the notion of sampling the late rapper Tupac Shakur’s song “Me and My Girlfriend” as the foundation for a new song on Jay’s next album, The Blueprint2: The Gift & the Curse. He’d already composed an instrumental track for the song with musician E. Base and producer Just Blaze. When Kanye played it for Jay, Jay was so inspired by it that he had a video concept in mind for him and Beyoncé before he even had lyrics for the song. It didn’t take long for him to come up with the rap, which is in part, “Let’s lock this down like it’s supposed to be / the ’03 Bonnie and Clyde, Hov and B.” (“Hov” and “Hova” are nicknames Jay Z took after proclaiming himself the “Jehovah of hip-hop”—the savior of the genre.) Beyoncé, on the hook, brings the song home with, “Down to ride to the very end, me and my boyfriend.”
In August 2002, Jay and Beyoncé went into the studio to record the song. Released soon afterward, in October, it would end up being the lead single from The Blueprint2: The Gift & the Curse (which debuted at number one on the Billboard Top 200).
Considering that Beyoncé’s first solo release four months earlier had been the disappointing “Work It Out,” there was not only anticipation but also some apprehension for whatever she had in mind next. No one could have predicted a duet with the hottest rapper in the business.
Beyoncé—cool, aloof, and impossibly gorgeous in her bare-midriff outfits and a variety of ball caps—seems a very different character in the “’03 Bonnie & Clyde” video from the young woman in the many Destiny’s Child videos. As the two play criminals on the lam, her rapport with Jay is unmistakable. “We exchanged audiences,” Jay would later recall to Rolling Stone. “Her records are huge Top 40 records, and she helped ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ go to number one. What I gave her was a street credibility, a different edge.”
“What am I gonna do with this tattoo now?” Lyndall Locke asked Beyoncé after it was clear that she and Jay were now together. By this time, Lyndall had no choice; he had to accept it. Beyoncé had moved on, she was with Jay now, and there was no going back. Long ago he’d gotten a tattoo of the letters “B.G.K.” on his upper thigh while on a high school senior trip to Mexico, for “Beyoncé Giselle Knowles.” In helping him try to figure out what to do with the tat now, she suggested he have an “I” tattooed between the “B” and “G,” and then have the “K” changed to an “L,” thereby making it “B.I.G.L.”—“for Big Lyndall,” she said, laughing. “Problem solved!”
For Beyoncé, it would seem that the problem of Lyndall Locke really was on its way to being solved.
It seems unfair to point out the differences between Lyndall and Jay. After all, most men would pale when compared to Jay Z, an artist who used his talent, wit, and a language all his own to leave the ghetto behind and amass a veritable fortune. By the time he and Beyoncé began dating, he was on his seventh hit album and was said to have a net worth of $120 million. Though the two were still getting to know one another, Jay was proving himself as someone in whom Beyoncé could confide. Whereas she rarely had in-depth conversations with Lyndall about her career, with Jay such dialogue somehow seemed more natural. Since he was also in the business, he understood her and her lifestyle
and some of the challenges she faced. He noticed, for instance, that she seemed not to be in touch with her anger. When she had a disagreement with her record label, she spent the week silently fuming over it. “You need to let that shit out,” he told her. She said that her mother had taught her a more decorous way, which was, she said, “to count to ten.” Jay suggested, “Count to three, you’ll be better off.”
He also noticed that she seemed suspicious by nature. Perhaps because of having been so protected for so long, Beyoncé didn’t always trust people with whom she had to work who were not in her immediate circle. She knew it was true and had begun to work on it while on the sets of her movies. Jay was the same way, always had been. He too was working on it.
Conversely, when it came to her fans, Beyoncé had no discerning ability whatsoever. “At one point, Beyoncé thought everybody was her friend,” recalled her bodyguard, Tony Brigham. “It took me and her dad to sit her down and talk to her, just for safety issues.”
Beyoncé would vacillate back and forth as she worked to find a place where she could trust others yet also be protective, not only of her business affairs but also her personal safety. Jay did what he could to help. “Fact is, Bey, not everyone is out to get you,” he would reportedly tell her, “though most people probably are,” he would conclude with a chuckle.
Dangerously in Love
Though there were a few songs on the first four Destiny’s Child albums (including the Christmas album) that must have felt to Beyoncé like solo recordings, considering that she sang all of the parts, the truth was that she didn’t have to bear full responsibility for those compositions. They were still released as Destiny’s Child songs and as such were not branded with her name. Thus she was able to keep a certain distance from them. If the songs weren’t successful in the marketplace, they wouldn’t reflect poorly on her as much as they would on the group. Of course, most of those songs were wildly successful not only from a commercial standpoint but from an artistic one as well. Still, when the time came for Beyoncé to record a solo album, she felt intense pressure and anxiety about it. She had raised the bar so high for herself with Destiny’s Child, she wondered how she would ever meet such standards. Adding to the pressure was that even with the support of a label that had always endorsed the idea of a solo career for her, it was now clear that success was not guaranteed in that venue. It was still a gamble, and she and everyone in her camp knew it.
Becoming Beyoncé Page 38
