The story of Jay-Z

Growing up in Marcy

Shawn Corey Carter was born in Brooklyn on the fourth of December 1969, the youngest of four children. He grew up in the Marcy Houses, a public housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant made up of twenty-seven six storey buildings. He later described it as a place of extreme highs and lows, where kids played in the spray of an open fire hydrant one afternoon and a shooting could break out at noon the next day. His parents, Gloria Carter and Adnis Reeves, owned a big record collection full of Motown, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway. That music filled the apartment, and decades later he would sample much of it. When he was about nine, his mother bought him a boom box, hoping music would keep him off the streets.[1] [2] [3]

Then his father walked out. Adnis Reeves left the family when Shawn was still a boy, around nine by one account and eleven by another, and Gloria raised the four children on her own. Shawn has said that most of his friends' fathers were gone too, and that his generation took the old records those men left behind and built something new out of them. He started writing rhymes somewhere between the ages of nine and eleven. A sixth grade teacher he remembers as Miss Louden gave him a hunger for language, and he began reading the dictionary in search of big, impressive words. Around the neighbourhood the kid with the notebook was known as Jazzy.[1] [2]

Crack cocaine arrived in Marcy around 1985, when Shawn was twelve or thirteen. He has described vials lying in the elevators and floating down the gutters, and the old respect between children and neighbourhood elders simply breaking down. By his own account, and in many of his lyrics, he began selling crack as a teenager, and he has said he was shot at three times during those years. He moved between Eli Whitney High School and George Westinghouse in Brooklyn, then Trenton Central High School in New Jersey, where he dropped out in his sophomore year. Asked much later whether he thought then about the damage he was doing, he admitted that it only came to him later on.[1] [2]

The darkest story from those years is one he tells himself. On the closing song of his 1997 album In My Lifetime, Volume One, he says that in 1982, at the age of twelve, he shot his older brother Eric in the shoulder after Eric stole his jewellery. He returned to the moment twenty years later on the album 4:44, in a song about confronting his own ego. His guide into music in those years was an older Marcy rapper named Jonathan Burks, who called himself Jaz-O and was known as the Originator. Shawn would build his stage name as a tribute to that mentor, turning the nickname Jazzy into Jay-Z.[1] [2] [3]

The apprentice years

Jaz-O and his young protégé formed a short-lived duo called High Potent in 1986, and Jay-Z can be heard on Jaz-O's early single H.P. Gets Busy. Jaz-O then landed a deal with EMI, and the label had a plan borrowed from DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Jaz-O would be the rapper, Jay-Z the hype man, and a Queens DJ called Irv the man on the turntables. In 1988 all three flew to London to make the album Word to the Jaz. Jay-Z's guest verse on its single Hawaiian Sophie reached the rap chart in 1989. The trip also began a lasting friendship with the DJ, whom Jay-Z would later nickname Irv Gotti.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The big break did not come. EMI dropped Jaz-O in the early nineties, and Jay-Z went back to dealing to support himself. He kept rapping on the side, appearing on two songs by the group Original Flavor in 1993, and he caught the attention of Big Daddy Kane, one of the most respected rappers alive. Jay-Z toured with Kane, and Kane later explained the arrangement. When he left the stage to change outfits, he would send out Jay-Z and Positive K to freestyle until he came back. In 1994 Jay-Z appeared on Kane's posse cut Show and Prove, alongside Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan.[1] [2] [3]

For years he kept one foot in music and one foot on the street. He made demos with the producer DJ Clark Kent and then drifted back to hustling, and a cousin stopped speaking to him because he thought Shawn was wasting his talent. Along the way he developed his famous habit of not writing lyrics down. On the street he would scribble ideas on paper bags from the corner bodega, and as he spent more time away from his notebook he trained himself to memorise whole verses. In the studio, a friend watching him record without paper joked that it was a religious experience and called him J-Hova. The nickname Hov stuck for life.[1] [2]

One night in 1994 nearly ended it all. Jay-Z later wrote that he was pulled over by police while carrying cocaine hidden in a secret compartment in his car. He refused to let the officers search the vehicle, and they called for drug sniffing dogs. When the dogs did not arrive in time, the police had to let him go, and moments after he drove off he saw a patrol car carrying the dogs pass by. He turned the episode into the second verse of 99 Problems a decade later. In 1995 he released his first solo single, In My Lifetime, through a small label called Payday, but he felt the company was not working his records properly.[1] [2] [3]

Roc-A-Fella and Reasonable Doubt

With no major label interested, Jay-Z took matters into his own hands. He sold his music out of the trunk of his car with the help of a friend from Harlem named Damon Dash, and together with Dash and Kareem Burke, known as Biggs, he started Roc-A-Fella Records. The name came from a rapper called Tone Hooker, a double meaning that pointed at the wealthy Rockefeller family and at rocking a fella in a battle. The partners rented a small, cheap office on John Street in Lower Manhattan and treated it as a starting point on the way up. A distribution deal with Priority Records gave the tiny label a route into the shops.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay-Z was twenty six when he recorded his debut, and he later said the studio was like a psychiatrist's couch. The beats came from DJ Premier, the young producer Ski, Knobody and Clark Kent. Ski and Clark Kent both built tracks from the same Stylistics record for the song Politics as Usual, and Ski's made the album simply because he handed it in first. Can't Knock the Hustle, with Mary J. Blige, was produced in Knobody's mother's house and recorded on tour in Tampa. Nas was supposed to appear on two songs, including Bring It On, but those sessions never happened. That absence would matter later.[1] [2] [3]

The lead single, Dead Presidents, came out on the twentieth of February 1996. Ski built its chorus from a line of Nas's voice, taken from his song The World Is Yours. Nas was invited to re-record the line and appear in the video, but he said no, and some fans trace the whole Jay-Z and Nas rivalry back to that refusal. The video shoot had one happier result. On set Jay-Z met the Notorious B.I.G., another Brooklyn rapper who also never wrote his rhymes down. The two men recorded Brooklyn's Finest together over two months, a friendly duel in which each tried to prove he was the other's equal.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reasonable Doubt came out on the twenty fifth of June 1996. It sold forty three thousand copies in its first week and peaked at only number twenty three on the Billboard 200, the lowest chart position of his career. None of its four singles reached the top forty. Yet critics adored its cool, detailed stories of the hustler's life, and over the years it grew into a landmark, the album many fans still call his best. It went platinum in 2002. Rolling Stone placed it at number sixty seven on its 2020 list of the greatest albums of all time, and it helped turn mafia style storytelling into a whole strand of rap.[1] [2]

In June 1997 Def Jam bought half of Roc-A-Fella for an estimated one point four million dollars, giving Jay-Z the reach of a major label. But that year also brought grief. On the ninth of March 1997, Biggie was shot dead by an unknown gunman in a drive-by shooting while visiting Los Angeles. Jay-Z said later that his second album was no fun to make, and that Biggie's death hung over songs like The City Is Mine. In My Lifetime, Volume One arrived in November 1997 with a glossier sound from Puff Daddy's production team, the Hitmen. It debuted at number three and went platinum, and he opened shows on Puff Daddy's No Way Out tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The hard knock life

His third album turned him into a pop star, thanks to a song from a Broadway musical about an orphan. The producer the 45 King built a beat around It's the Hard Knock Life from Annie, but the song's writers were protective of it. Jay-Z wrote them a letter describing how much Annie meant to him, and in his memoir he admitted that he exaggerated, claiming he had won an essay contest and seen the show on Broadway when he had only watched it on television. The rights came through. Hard Knock Life reached number fifteen in America and number two in Britain, where only Cher's Believe kept it from the top.[1] [2] [3]

Volume Two, Hard Knock Life came out on the twenty ninth of September 1998 and sold more than three hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first week. It was his first number one album, it stayed on top for five weeks, and it became the best selling record of his career, with well over five million sold in America. Producers like Swizz Beatz and Timbaland gave it a harder, brighter sound, and the single Can I Get A, recorded with Ja Rule and Amil for the Rush Hour soundtrack, reached the top twenty. It won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, but Jay-Z boycotted the ceremony, angry that DMX had been overlooked and that the rap awards would not be shown on television.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The money was now real. Damon Dash organised the 1999 Hard Knock Life tour, which made nineteen million dollars. That summer Mariah Carey invited Jay-Z onto Heartbreaker, the lead single from her album Rainbow. He wrote his whole verse and helped shape the instrumental, and the song spent two weeks at number one, his first chart topper. Contract problems kept him out of the original video, so a second version was cut two weeks later with Jay-Z rapping in a jacuzzi. Then came Volume Three, The Life and Times of S. Carter, released on the twenty eighth of December 1999, which sold four hundred and sixty two thousand copies in its first week.[1] [2] [3]

Just before that album came out, his temper put everything at risk. On the second of December 1999, at a party for Q-Tip's album Amplified at the Kit Kat Klub in Times Square, Jay-Z confronted the record executive Lance Rivera, known as Un, whom he believed was behind a bootleg of his new album. A commotion broke out, and Rivera was stabbed in the stomach. Jay-Z surrendered to police the next evening and was released on fifty thousand dollars bail. He pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said they had witnesses and videotape showing he was nowhere near Rivera. In his 2010 memoir he wrote that he blacked out with anger that night and vowed never to lose control like that again.[1] [2] [3]

Big Pimpin', his song with the Texas duo UGK and producer Timbaland, became the biggest single from the new album. Its video was shot at Carnival in Trinidad, though Pimp C refused to fly there, so his part was filmed in Miami Beach. Years later Jay-Z told the Wall Street Journal that reading the lyrics back made him wince. In October 2000 he released The Dynasty, Roc La Familia, which was meant to be a label compilation until Def Jam turned it into a Jay-Z album. It introduced a new crew of producers, Just Blaze, Kanye West, Bink and the Neptunes, and a warmer, more soulful sound that would define his next era.[1] [2] [3]

The Blueprint and the war with Nas

By 2001 Jay-Z was one of the most attacked rappers in New York. Prodigy of Mobb Deep had taken offence at a 1998 line he read as a dig, and Nas had sniped at him on record. At Hot 97's Summer Jam in June 2001, Jay-Z answered. He performed new verses aimed at Prodigy while the big screen showed a childhood photo of Prodigy dressed as Michael Jackson, and then, in a stunning twist, he brought the real Michael Jackson onto the stage. He closed the song with a jab at Nas. When Nas hit back, Jay-Z added a whole new verse about him, and the song became Takeover.[1] [2] [3]

He made The Blueprint in a hurry, reportedly cutting nine songs in two days while awaiting two criminal trials, one for the stabbing and one for gun possession. Its sound was built on vintage soul samples, largely from two young producers, Kanye West and Just Blaze, and the only guest verse came from Eminem on Renegade. To beat bootleggers, the release was moved up a week to the eleventh of September 2001, the morning of the terrorist attacks. Even so, it sold more than four hundred and twenty seven thousand copies in its first week and held number one for three weeks. He gave a dollar from every ticket on his tour that autumn to relief organisations.[1] [2] [3]

Nas answered Takeover with Ether, released on the fourth of December 2001, Jay-Z's thirty second birthday. It questioned whether his street past was real, mocked his looks, used homophobic insults, and claimed that Eminem had outshone him on his own album. That night Jay-Z and Dash walked into a New York club and asked the DJ not to play it. The DJ played it anyway, and the rapper Ras Kass said the room exploded, which told him Nas had won. When the station Hot 97 asked listeners to pick the better diss, Nas took fifty eight percent of the vote, and the word ether became slang for destroying an opponent.[1] [2]

Jay-Z's reply went too far. On Supa Ugly he boasted in graphic detail about an affair with Carmen Bryan, the mother of Nas's daughter. His own mother, Gloria, was disgusted and told him to apologise to Nas and his family, and in December 2001 he did so on Hot 97. The battle faded into sly lines on later records. His legal troubles also wound down. On the seventeenth of October 2001 he pleaded guilty over the Rivera stabbing and was later sentenced to three years' probation, and the separate gun charge was dropped after another man admitted the weapon was his. In November he taped MTV Unplugged with the Roots as his band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2002 he released The Best of Both Worlds, a joint album with R. Kelly, and then a double album, The Blueprint 2, The Gift and the Curse. It sold five hundred and forty five thousand copies in its first week, though Jay-Z later called it one of his worst albums because it was simply too long. Its biggest single, '03 Bonnie and Clyde, paired him with Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny's Child, and the video, with her playing his girlfriend, set off rumours the two were dating. The album also carried a posthumous track with Biggie and a jab at his old mentor Jaz-O, who had refused to sign with Roc-A-Fella and was now an enemy.[1] [2] [3]

Retirement and the boardroom

In November 2003 Jay-Z announced he was quitting. The Black Album was billed as his farewell, and he wanted a different producer on almost every song, from Just Blaze and Kanye West to Timbaland, 9th Wonder and Rick Rubin. Rubin gave him 99 Problems, a stripped down rock track that was the producer's first hip hop work in years. The black and white video, directed by Mark Romanek, was shot around Marcy and ended with Jay-Z being gunned down, which he explained as the death of Jay-Z and the rebirth of Shawn Carter. The album sold four hundred and sixty three thousand copies in its first week and became his biggest seller of the decade.[1] [2]

On the twenty fifth of November 2003 he threw a retirement party at a sold out Madison Square Garden, with the Roots' drummer Questlove in his band and proceeds going to charity, including his own scholarship fund. In one of the night's most moving moments, he brought out Voletta Wallace and Afeni Shakur, the mothers of Biggie and Tupac. The concert became the 2004 film Fade to Black. That same year he and his mother set up the Shawn Carter Foundation to help students facing hardship get through college. And before his father Adnis Reeves died in 2003, father and son met and made their peace.[1] [2]

Retirement turned out to be busy. For fans who wanted to remix his farewell, Roc-A-Fella released the vocals of The Black Album on their own, and the producer Danger Mouse blended them with the Beatles' White Album to make The Grey Album. EMI tried to stop it, and in February 2004 activists posted it for free download in protest. Later that year MTV asked Jay-Z to pick a partner for a mash-up show. He chose Linkin Park, working with Mike Shinoda largely by email, and the whole Collision Course EP was put together in four days. It went to number one, and Numb and Encore won a Grammy, performed at the ceremony with a surprise appearance by Paul McCartney.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the end of 2004 the retired rapper became a record boss. Island Def Jam bought the half of Roc-A-Fella it did not already own and named Jay-Z president and chief executive of Def Jam. The deal broke up the original partnership, and Damon Dash and Biggs left to start their own label. Dash sold his share of the clothing brand Rocawear in 2005, and in 2007 Jay-Z sold the brand's rights for two hundred and four million dollars. At Def Jam he signed a teenager from Barbados named Rihanna after an audition in his office in 2005. L.A. Reid told him not to let her leave the building without a deal, and she waited while the lawyers drew up the contract.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty seventh of October 2005 he headlined a New York radio concert titled I Declare War, and fans braced for an attack on his rivals. Instead he called out Nas, and the two old enemies shook hands and performed Dead Presidents together. Months later Jay-Z signed Nas to Def Jam. His own comeback, Kingdom Come, followed in November 2006 and sold six hundred and eighty thousand copies in its first week, the biggest of his career, though he later called it his worst album. Its song Lost One mourned his nephew Colleek Luckie, killed in a crash in a car Jay-Z had given him as a graduation present, a death he blamed on himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mogul and husband

In 2007 he watched Ridley Scott's film American Gangster and was inspired to write a concept album about his own hustling past. He played the film on monitors above the vocal booth while he recorded, and live horns, strings and drums gave the music a seventies soul feel. He refused to let iTunes sell the songs one by one, saying a film is not sold scene by scene. American Gangster reached number one, tying Elvis Presley for the second most number one albums, and Rolling Stone named its single Roc Boys the best song of 2007. On the first of January 2008 he stepped down as president of Def Jam.[1] [2]

On the fourth of April 2008 he married Beyoncé in a small private ceremony in Tribeca. They had kept their relationship low key for years and still rarely discuss it. That spring he was announced as the first major hip hop headliner at Glastonbury, and Noel Gallagher of Oasis said it was wrong to have hip hop there. Jay-Z answered on stage. His set opened with a clip of Gallagher's comments, and then he strolled out with a guitar and led the crowd through a mocking version of Wonderwall. Festival founder Michael Eavis called the show a triumph, and one British chain reported that sales of The Black Album rose nearly fivefold.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2008 he signed a deal worth about one hundred and fifty million dollars with the concert giant Live Nation, and the next year he paid a reported five million dollars to buy out the rest of his Def Jam contract. His new company, Roc Nation, would be a label, a management firm and a publisher. The Blueprint 3, recorded largely in Hawaii to avoid leaks, came out in September 2009 and gave him his eleventh number one album, one more than Elvis. Its biggest song, Empire State of Mind with Alicia Keys, was written by Angela Hunte, who grew up in the same Brooklyn building as Jay-Z. It spent five weeks at number one.[1] [2] [3]

In November 2010 he published Decoded, a memoir built around the stories behind his lyrics. That year he and Eminem also played two shows each in Detroit and New York, including a pair at Yankee Stadium. Then he teamed up with Kanye West, the producer he had helped launch, on the joint album Watch the Throne. They recorded in hotel rooms around the world, including a block of rooms at the Mercer Hotel in New York, and released it on iTunes first to beat a leak. It sold four hundred and thirty six thousand copies in its first week, and their tour became the highest grossing hip hop tour up to that point.[1] [2] [3]

On the seventh of January 2012 Beyoncé gave birth to their daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Two days later he released Glory, a song about fatherhood that also revealed the couple had suffered a miscarriage. Blue Ivy's cries were heard at the end, which made her, at two days old, the youngest person ever credited on a Billboard chart. That year also saw a homecoming. Jay-Z had owned a small piece of the New Jersey Nets since 2003 and pushed for their move to the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and in October 2012 he took the subway to his own sold out concert there. He also launched the Made in America festival in Philadelphia.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cracks, confession and the Carters

He announced his twelfth album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, in a Samsung advert during the 2013 NBA Finals, and Samsung bought a million copies to give away free to its phone owners on the fourth of July. He also dropped the hyphen from his name for a while, becoming Jay Z. That April he sold his Nets stake to start a sports agency, Roc Nation Sports. A trip to Cuba with Beyoncé caused a political row, and President Obama joked at the White House Correspondents' Dinner that he now had ninety nine problems and Jay-Z was one. By December Jay-Z led the Grammy nominations with nine, more than anyone else.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In May 2014 the celebrity site TMZ published security footage from an elevator at the Standard hotel in Manhattan, taken after a Met Gala party. It showed Beyoncé's sister Solange kicking and punching Jay-Z while a bodyguard held her back and Beyoncé stood by. The family released a joint statement saying that Jay and Solange each took their share of responsibility and that they had worked through it. Jay-Z later insisted they had only ever had one disagreement. Many people read the fight as a sign of trouble in the marriage, and divorce rumours followed the couple throughout their joint stadium tour that summer, On the Run.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2015 he bought the Norwegian company Aspiro for about fifty six million dollars and relaunched its streaming service, Tidal, as a platform owned by artists. At the launch he stood on stage with co-owners including Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West, Madonna and Daft Punk. Critics called it expensive and elitist, and in 2017 a Norwegian newspaper reported that Tidal had far fewer subscribers than claimed. That same year, 2015, the writer dream hampton said Jay-Z and Beyoncé had quietly wired tens of thousands of dollars to bail out protesters arrested in Baltimore and Ferguson. It fitted his stated belief that the best giving is anonymous.[1] [2] [3]

In April 2016 Beyoncé released Lemonade, an album and film that laid bare her pain over her husband's infidelity. In November Kanye West stopped a concert in Sacramento to rant about Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and their friendship fell apart. A year later Jay-Z replied to both. His album 4:44, produced by No I.D. and released on the thirtieth of June 2017, was the most personal of his life. He wrote the title song after waking at four forty four in the morning and recorded it on Beyoncé's microphone as an apology to her. On Smile, his mother Gloria Carter came out as a lesbian and read a poem about living in the shadows.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

4:44 reached number one and earned Grammy nominations for Album, Song and Record of the Year, though one line in The Story of O.J. was criticised for repeating a stereotype about Jewish people, which he later called an exaggeration. In June 2017 Beyoncé gave birth to twins, Rumi and Sir, and that year he became the first rapper voted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. On the sixteenth of June 2018, on stage in London, the couple revealed a surprise joint album as the Carters, Everything Is Love. On it they admitted they had split up and got back together. Its video, filmed inside the Louvre, helped the museum draw a record ten million visitors that year.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Billionaire and elder statesman

In 2019 Forbes declared Jay-Z hip hop's first billionaire, his fortune spread across music, champagne, property, sport and streaming. That August Roc Nation signed a deal with the National Football League to produce the Super Bowl halftime show and advise on its social justice work. Many fans were angry, because the league was widely seen as having shut out Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who had taken a knee on the field before games in protest at police brutality. Jay-Z said the league was willing to make changes. He also co-founded the Reform Alliance with Meek Mill to campaign for probation and parole reform, and he produced documentaries about Kalief Browder and Trayvon Martin.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2021 Tidal was sold to Jack Dorsey's payments company Square, and Jay-Z joined its board. That autumn he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. He and Kanye West also patched things up on record, with Jay-Z's verse on Kanye's song Jail, reportedly recorded just hours before its first public playback. It won the Grammy for Best Rap Song. In 2023 he and Beyoncé paid two hundred million dollars for a Malibu house by the architect Tadao Ando, a California record, and the Brooklyn Public Library staged an exhibition about his life called The Book of Hov. In 2024 the Grammys gave him their Global Impact Award.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

In December 2024 came the most serious accusation of his life. The Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee refiled a civil lawsuit on behalf of a woman known as Jane Doe, who alleged that Jay-Z and Sean Combs had raped her at a party after the MTV Video Music Awards in 2000, when she was thirteen. Jay-Z denied it furiously, calling the claims heinous and urging the lawyer to file a criminal complaint instead. He had already sued Buzbee, accusing him of trying to extort him, and Buzbee in turn sued Roc Nation. On the fourteenth of February 2025 the woman dropped her case with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled. Jay-Z spoke of the trauma his wife and children had endured.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The story took one more turn. After the case was dropped, a recording emerged of the woman telling investigators hired by Jay-Z's side that her lawyer had pushed her to name him, though she then swore she stood by her claims. In September 2026 she went much further. In a sworn statement filed in federal court in Manhattan, she said Jay-Z had never raped her, that she had never even met him, and that she was sorry for the pain her false accusation had caused. Her new lawyer said she still considered herself a victim of assault, but had been mistaken about Jay-Z. As of 2026 he was still pursuing Buzbee in court.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2026 he marked thirty years since his debut. In February he put the original Dead Presidents on streaming services and restored the two dots over the Y in his name, spelling it as on the Reasonable Doubt cover. In May he headlined the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia, his first big solo headline show in years. Then in July he played three nights at Yankee Stadium, one for Reasonable Doubt with Beyoncé joining him for Can't Knock the Hustle, one for The Blueprint with Eminem, Slick Rick and Pharrell Williams, and a third called Extra Innings. In September HBO began airing JAŸ-Z in 8, in which he talks through his songs with Rick Rubin.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

The people around Jay-Z

Jay-Z and Beyoncé. They first recorded together on '03 Bonnie and Clyde in 2002, and his verse on her Crazy in Love the next year helped launch her solo career. They married quietly on the fourth of April 2008 and have three children, Blue Ivy and the twins Rumi and Sir. His infidelity became the subject of her Lemonade and his apology on 4:44, and they reunited on record as the Carters in 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Jay-Z and Kanye West. Kanye West was a young Chicago producer when his soul samples shaped The Blueprint, and Roc-A-Fella reluctantly signed him as a rapper. They made Watch the Throne together in 2011. The friendship broke down in 2016 after West ranted about Jay-Z on stage, and West said the trouble began after his wedding. They reunited on record with Jail in 2021, which won a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Jay-Z and Nas. Two of New York's greatest rappers began as acquaintances, until Nas skipped a Reasonable Doubt session and refused to re-record the Dead Presidents hook. Their feud peaked with Takeover and Ether in 2001. In 2005 they shook hands on stage at I Declare War, Jay-Z signed Nas to Def Jam, and they went on to record Black Republican and several other songs together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay-Z and Damon Dash. Dash was Jay-Z's manager and his partner in Roc-A-Fella Records and the clothing brand Rocawear, and he helped sell those early tapes from the car. They fell out as Dash expanded into films and Jay-Z took the Def Jam presidency in 2004, and Dash sold his Rocawear stake in 2005. In 2021 Roc-A-Fella went to court to stop Dash auctioning a digital token linked to Reasonable Doubt.[1] [2] [3]

Jay-Z and Jaz-O. Jaz-O, an older rapper from Marcy, taught the teenage Jay-Z the rapid triplet flow and took him to London in 1988. The friendship soured when Jaz-O refused to sign with Roc-A-Fella, and the two traded insults on record for years. They reunited at a 4:44 concert in December 2017, and Jaz-O's music was later distributed through a Roc Nation company.[1] [2]

Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G.. The two Brooklyn rappers met on the Dead Presidents video set and recorded Brooklyn's Finest together for Reasonable Doubt, discovering that neither wrote his rhymes down. Biggie was shot dead in Los Angeles in March 1997, and Jay-Z said his death weighed on his next album. He honoured Biggie's mother at his 2003 Garden show and helped relaunch Biggie's clothing line.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay-Z and Gloria Carter. His mother raised four children alone in Marcy and bought her son his first boom box to keep him busy. When he insulted Nas's family on Supa Ugly, she made him apologise on the radio. In 2003 they founded the Shawn Carter Foundation together, and in 2017 she came out as a lesbian on his song Smile, reading her own poem.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay-Z and Adnis Reeves. His father left the family when Jay-Z was a boy, leaving behind the records his son would later sample. The absence runs through many of his songs. Father and son met and reconciled before Reeves died in 2003, and in 2017 Jay-Z used his father's first name, Adnis, as the title of a teaser song for 4:44, released on Father's Day.[1] [2] [3]

Jay-Z and Rihanna. Jay-Z signed Rihanna to Def Jam in 2005 after an audition in his office, and he spent months helping complete her first album. His guest verse opened her breakthrough Umbrella in 2007, which won them a Grammy together. She moved her management to his Roc Nation in 2010 and sang on his hit Run This Town.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jay-Z and Solange Knowles. Beyoncé's younger sister became part of Jay-Z's family when he married in 2008. In May 2014 leaked hotel security footage showed her attacking him in an elevator after a Met Gala party. The family said they had worked it through, and Jay-Z later called Solange his sister, not his sister in law, and praised her music as underrated.[1] [2]

Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek. Memphis Bleek grew up in Marcy too and was one of the first artists signed to Roc-A-Fella, appearing on Reasonable Doubt as a teenager and serving for years as Jay-Z's hype man. He named his 2005 album 534 after the number of their building. He left the label in 2009 with Jay-Z's encouragement to run his own company.[1] [2]

Jay-Z and Mike Shinoda. Before forming Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda liked mixing Jay-Z songs with rock tracks. In 2004 Jay-Z picked his band for an MTV mash-up show, and the two traded ideas by email before recording Collision Course in four days. Its single Numb and Encore won a Grammy, and Jay-Z later executive produced Shinoda's side project, Fort Minor.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Jay-Z

• Jay-Z says he wrote his first rhymes between the ages of nine and eleven, after studying the dictionary for impressive words. He credits a sixth grade teacher he calls Miss Louden with sparking his love of language. One early boast he still remembers described himself as the king of hip hop, which he later found oddly prophetic.[1]
• He stopped writing lyrics down after his first album and has lost whole albums' worth of verses by forgetting them. As a young hustler he scribbled ideas on bodega paper bags and learned to memorise verses. He told NPR he would not advise the method to anyone, because he had forgotten material he thought was great.[1]
• The nickname Hova began as a joke about him recording without paper, which a friend called a religious experience. The friend dubbed him J-Hova, and it stuck. The chant in his hit Izzo spells out Hova in the playground slang he grew up with.[1]
• To win the rights to sample Annie, Jay-Z admitted he exaggerated his love of the musical in a letter to its writers. In his memoir he said he claimed to have won an essay contest and seen Annie on Broadway. In fact he had only watched it on television.[1] [2]
• Hard Knock Life stalled at number two in Britain, held off by Cher's Believe. It debuted at number two on the UK singles chart in December 1998 while Believe was in its seventh straight week at the top.[1]
• Blue Ivy Carter was on the Billboard charts at two days old. Her cries closed her father's song Glory, released two days after her birth in January 2012. She was credited as B.I.C. and became the youngest person ever to chart on Billboard.[1] [2]
• The Blueprint 3 cover was made without photo editing software. The designers stacked white instruments in a room, projected three red bars onto them, painted the red on by hand, and then photographed the result. It was his first album cover without his face.[1]
• Jay-Z ghostwrote lyrics for Dr. Dre's comeback single Still D.R.E. Dre said Jay-Z's first draft was all diamonds and Bentleys, so he asked for something more Los Angeles, and Jay-Z came back twenty minutes later with it. Snoop Dogg later said Jay-Z wrote the whole song.[1] [2]
• The 99 Problems video was first intended for Quentin Tarantino. Rick Rubin suggested Jay-Z offer it to Mark Romanek instead. Romanek shot it in black and white around Marcy, and it won four MTV Video Music Awards.[1]
• A law professor wrote a line by line legal analysis of the traffic stop verse in 99 Problems. In 2011 Caleb Mason of Southwestern Law School used the verse to teach search and seizure law, finding some of Jay-Z's legal claims accurate and others wrong.[1]
• One of the Chuckle Brothers once covered 99 Problems on BBC Radio 1. In 2008 Barry Chuckle recorded a version for Scott Mills's show, and Mills declared it superior to the original.[1]
• Pimp C refused to fly to Trinidad for the Big Pimpin' video. Jay-Z and Bun B filmed at Trinidad's Carnival, so Pimp C's verse and the closing scenes were shot in Miami Beach instead.[1]
• An Egyptian composer's family fought Jay-Z in court for years over a sample in Big Pimpin'. The song samples Khosara Khosara, sung by Abdel Halim Hafez. Jay-Z testified he did not know it contained the sample, and in 2018 an appeals court ruled in his favour.[1]
• Jay-Z was barred by contract from the original Heartbreaker video with Mariah Carey. A second cut appeared two weeks later, replacing a cartoon with Jay-Z rapping from a jacuzzi. The video cost more than two and a half million dollars.[1]
• His verse on Crazy in Love was improvised in about ten minutes at three in the morning. He arrived late in the production, and his spoken introduction opens the song, which topped the Hot 100 for eight weeks.[1] [2]
• Jay-Z secretly rewrote his verse on Rihanna's Umbrella. The songwriters were puzzled at first but decided his new version, full of weather metaphors, served the song better. It spent ten weeks at number one in Britain.[1]
• The actor Idris Elba co-produced the intro to American Gangster. He is credited under the name Driis, alongside producer Chris Flames.[1]
• He pulled American Gangster from iTunes rather than let it be sold song by song. He argued that films are not sold scene by scene. The album only reached iTunes in 2011.[1]
• The Blueprint cover was modelled on a photo of British organised crime. Jonathan Mannion based it on an image from Jocelyn Bain Hogg's series The Firm, swapping a telephone and brass knuckles for cigars and a microphone.[1]
• The Blueprint was the first twenty first century album chosen for America's National Recording Registry. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.[1] [2]
• Michael Jackson walked on stage at Jay-Z's Summer Jam show in 2001. The same set featured a childhood photo of Prodigy dressed as Michael Jackson on the big screen.[1] [2]
• Collision Course was only the second EP ever to top the Billboard 200. The first was Alice in Chains' Jar of Flies in 1994. The Jay-Z and Linkin Park set was assembled in four days.[1]
• Numb and Encore set a British record for the longest top twenty run without reaching the top ten. It peaked at number fourteen yet spent thirteen weeks in the top twenty and forty five weeks in the top one hundred.[1]
• Brooklyn's Finest was born when Jay-Z and Biggie realised neither wrote his rhymes down. They discovered it on the Dead Presidents video set. Recording the duet stretched over two months and two studios.[1]
• Ski and Clark Kent both made a beat for Politics as Usual, and Ski won by handing his in first. Both used the same Stylistics sample. Ski went on to produce four tracks on Reasonable Doubt, including Dead Presidents.[1] [2]
• The title song of 4:44 was written after he woke at 4:44 in the morning. He recorded it at home using Beyoncé's microphone. The album was made largely in No I.D.'s home studio in Hollywood.[1]
• 4:44 went platinum in five days because Sprint bought a million copies to give away. The phone company paid for each download, which made them count as sales. The photo of Jay-Z with his platinum award was taken before the album was out.[1] [2]
• Memphis Bleek named his album 534 after the Marcy building he and Jay-Z grew up in. Bleek was one of Roc-A-Fella's first signings and served for years as Jay-Z's hype man.[1]
• Empire State of Mind was written by a woman who grew up in Jay-Z's own building. Angela Hunte lived at 560 State Street, the address named in the song. She and Janet Sewell-Ulepic wrote it while homesick in London.[1]
• Jay-Z gave producer Irv Gotti his nickname in 1995. He called DJ Irv the Don of Hip-Hop, inspired by the mobster John Gotti, and the name stuck.[1]
• In 2006 Jay-Z was made a Nigerian chief, the Sarkin Waka of Kwara. He was enstooled by the Emir of Ilorin while visiting Nigeria for a United Nations clean water campaign.[1] [2]
• Barack Obama joked that he had ninety nine problems and Jay-Z was one. The line came at the 2013 White House Correspondents' Dinner, after a row over Jay-Z and Beyoncé's trip to Cuba.[1]
• Jay-Z bought out his own Def Jam contract for a reported five million dollars in 2009. It freed him to start Roc Nation with Live Nation, and The Blueprint 3 came out through the new company.[1] [2]
• The Everything Is Love video helped the Louvre break its visitor record. The museum drew ten point two million visitors in 2018, and it created a guided tour of the artworks seen in the video.[1] [2]
• Harry Belafonte publicly accused Jay-Z and Beyoncé of turning their backs on social responsibility. In a 2012 interview the singer and civil rights activist held up Bruce Springsteen as the better example.[1]
• His 2006 Radio City show celebrating Reasonable Doubt sold its three thousand tickets in two minutes. Backed by a fifty piece orchestra, he had Beyoncé sing Mary J. Blige's part on Can't Knock the Hustle.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.