Decoded (28 page)

It’s hard to explain the feeling in the air in the early and mid-nineties. MCs were taking leaps and bounds. You had Big getting established. You had underground battle legends like Big L creating dense metaphorical landscapes, inventing slang so perfect you’d swear it was already in the dictionary. You had Nas doing
Illmatic
. Wu-Tang starting to buzz. There was some creative, mind-blowing shit going on. Every MC with a mic was competing to push the art further than the last one, flipping all kinds of new content, new ways of telling stories, new slang, new rhyme schemes, new characters, new sources of inspiration. When I would come back to New York and get into the music, that was the world I was walking in, competing in. For all of my disgust with the industry, I never stopped caring about the craft or my standing in it. When I was in the presence of another true MC, I’d spit for days; I never said no. I’d put all the money and hustling to the side and be just like a traveling bluesman or something, ready to put my guitar case down and start playing. I wasn’t so thirsty for rap to pay my bills. It wasn’t just about money.

Every time Dame left these meetings he’d get so heated. He couldn’t believe they didn’t “get” me. But I wasn’t surprised. I expected nothing from the industry. I just tried to shrug it off and get back to my real life. Dame was getting frustrated trying to keep up with me, so he put together a makeshift tour to keep me focused on music. At the time, Dame was trying to do business with Kareem “Biggs” Burke, his man from the Bronx. Biggs and I clicked right away. We had a similar outlook and disposition. He came on and acted as a kind of road manager to help Dame with the tour dates, if you could call it a tour. Sometimes Dame and his group Original Flavor—Suave Lover, Tone, and Ski—and I would just pile up in a Pathfinder and do shows up and down the East Coast. I was being a team player; I piled in the truck, stayed in the double rooms with the rest of them. In some ways, those were like my college days, taking road trips, bunked up with friends, learning my profession, except that I still had a full-time job. It was a schizoid life, but it was all I knew.

THE SAME PLACE WHERE THE RHYME’S INVENTED

In some ways, rap was the ideal way for me to make sense of a life that was doubled, split into contradictory halves. This is one of the most powerful aspects of hip-hop as it evolved over the years. Rap is built to handle contradictions. To this day people look at me and assume that I must not be serious on some level, that I must be playing some kind of joke on the world: How can he be rapping about selling drugs on one album and then get on
Oprah
talking about making lemon pie the next day? How can he say that
police were al-Qaeda to black men
on one album and then do a benefit concert for the police who died on 9/11 to launch another? How can a song about the election of a black president and the dreams of Martin Luther King have a chorus about the color of his Maybach? When I was on the streets, my team would wonder why I was fucking with the rap shit. And when I was out doing shows, music cats would shake their heads at the fact that I was still hustling. How can he do both unless he’s some kind of hypocrite?

But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you
don’t
have contradictions inside you, that you’re so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.

Part of how contradictions are reconciled in rap comes from the nature of the music. I’ve rapped over bhangra, electronica, soul samples, classic rock, alternative rock, indie rock, the blues, doo-wop, bolero, jazz, Afrobeat, gypsy ballads, Luciano Pavarotti, and the theme song of a Broadway musical. That’s hip-hop: Anything can work—there are no laws, no rules. Hip-hop created a space where all kinds of music could meet, without contradiction.

When I recorded “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” over a mix of the theme song from
Annie
—a brilliant track put together by Mark the 45 King that I found through Kid Capri—I wasn’t worried about the clash between the hard lyrics (
where all my niggas with the rubber grips, buck shots
) and the image of redheaded Annie. Instead, I found the mirror between the two stories—that Annie’s story was mine, and mine was hers, and the song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reality.

To use that song from
Annie
we had to get clearance from the copyright holder. I wasn’t surprised when the company that owned the rights sent our lawyers a letter turning us down. Lord knows what they thought I was going to rap about over that track. Can you imagine “Fuck the Police” over “It’s a Hard Knock Life”? Actually, it would’ve been genius.

But I felt like the chorus to that song perfectly captured what little kids in the ghetto felt every day: “ ’Stead of kisses, we get kicked.” We might not all have literally been orphans, but a whole generation of us had basically raised ourselves in the streets. So I decided to write the company a letter myself. I made up this story about how when I was a seventh-grader in Bed-Stuy, our teacher held an essay contest and the three best papers won the writers a trip to the city to see
Annie
. A lie. I wrote that as kids in Brooklyn we hardly ever came into the city. True. I wrote that from the moment the curtain came up I felt like I understood honey’s story. Of course, I’d never been to see
Annie
on Broadway. But I had seen the movie on TV. Anyway, they bought it, cleared it, and I had one of my biggest hits. During my live shows I always stop the music and throw it to the crowd during the chorus. I stare out as a sea of people—old heads, teenagers, black, white, whatever—throw their hands up and heads back and sing like it’s the story of their own lives.

But it’s not just the music that allows hip-hop to contain contradictions. It’s in the act of rhyming itself. It’s simple: Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t. Take my song “Can I Live,” from
Reasonable Doubt
. The song opens with a spoken intro, just me talking:

That’s some real shit! But it’s a statement that raises questions. It’s sort of like the beginning of an argument. You can agree or disagree. Now here’s a line from the body of the song:

I’d rather die enormous than live dormant/that’s how we on it

That’s it. No argument, it is what it is. Why? The rhyme convinces you. The words connect. That simple couplet takes the idea of the spoken intro and makes it feel powerful, almost unassailable. Think about it: O. J. Simpson might be a free man today because “glove don’t fit” rhymed with “acquit.” It was a great sound bite for the media, but it was also as persuasive as the hook on a hit song. That’s the power of rhymes.

But while it seems like rhymes are tricking you into making connections that don’t really exist—
wait a minute, what about the DNA evidence, dammit!
—the truth is that rhymes are just reminding you that everything’s connected. Take the first verse of Rakim’s classic “In the Ghetto.” If you just made a list of the rhyming words in that first verse, here’s what it would look like:

First of all, when you look at a list like this, you realize how brilliant Rakim in his prime was. The rhyming words alone tell stories:
Rough/bust. Go/slow/flow.
The combination of
earth/ birth/universe
is a creation epic in three words. But what’s really dope is when you look at words that seem to have nothing to do with each other, like
seen on/fiend on/lean on.
What’s
that
story? Here’s the couplet:

Fantastic. Rakim chose the words because they rhymed, but it was his genius to combine them in a way that made it feel like those words were always meant to be connected.

So maybe it’s not an accident that rhyming kept me sane in those years when I was straddling so many different worlds. The rhymes brought me back to something basic in me, even if they were just technical rhymes, just rhyming for rhyming, with no real, deep
subject. And when I started writing about my life and the lives of the people around me, the rhymes helped me twist some sense out of those stories. And eventually the rhymes created a path for me to move from one life to another. Because I never had to reject Shawn Carter to become Jay-Z. Shawn Carter’s life lives in Jay’s rhymes—transformed, of course: Flesh and blood became words, ideas, metaphors, fantasies, and jokes. But those two characters come together through the rhymes, become whole again. The multitude is contained. It’s a power-ful magic. No wonder so many MCs lose their minds.

BLACK ENTREPRENEUR, NOBODY DID US NO FAVORS

After every label in the industry turned us down, and I do mean every label in town, Dame, Biggs and I decided, Fuck it, why be workers anyway? Being a recording artist on a major label is the most contractually exploitative relationship you can have in America, and it’s legal. All three of us had read
Hit Men,
the industry bible, and we knew what kind of gangsters had established record companies. And the truth is, even if we were willing to be exploited workers, these dudes were not fucking with us, at all.

Dame had taken the rejection personally; he wanted to win for the same reasons we all did, but he also looked forward to the day when the same people who’d turned us down would be calling us for hits. I never do things to get a reaction from other people, good or otherwise. My personal breakthroughs came in stages.

First, I had to let go of some of the past. My girlfriend in Virginia would sometimes come with me on my trips to New York. She knew what I was doing in Virginia—her brother was down with my crew—but she didn’t really know about my dreams of being an MC. On one road trip I told her about what happened in London with EMI and Jaz and how disappointed I had been. It was my first time really talking about it with anyone—not just the facts, but the feeling of a dream being crushed. When I said it to her, I realized I was actually scared of it happening again. When I heard myself telling her about Jaz, I realized that I was holding on to disappointment over failure that didn’t even belong to me. I was standing in my own way.