From the New York Post:
His First Arrest
Jay-Z’s first arrest came at age 16. He was dealing in Trenton, because his friend “Hill” had a supplier there. Hill had enrolled in the local high school, and one day when Jay-Z went to meet him, he got caught with crack in his pockets on the campus. Since he had no prior arrests, the police let him go, but they confiscated his supply. In order to make up the cash to the supplier, Jay-Z had to go back to Marcy and deal crack 60 hours straight — three days in a row, he writes. He kept awake by “eating cookies and writing rhymes on the back of brown paper bags.”
His First Hit
When Jay-Z recorded the song “Hard Knock Life” in 1998 — which made him a breakout star — he borrowed from the story of Little Orphan Annie. He said he found a “mirror” between his life and that of Annie’s. “The song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reality.” But first, he had to get clearance from the “Annie” franchise to use the “Hard Knock Life” chorus in his anthem. Initially, he was turned down. So he wrote the company a letter, making up a tale about how, when he was in the seventh grade, his teacher held an essay contest. The prize: A trip to the city to see “Annie.” This was, he writes, “A lie. I wrote that. . . I felt like I understood honey’s story.” The company believed Jay-Z’s tale and cleared the rights to what became his first mega-hit.
Dealing with Success
Jay-Z writes about the danger hip-hop stars face — mostly at the hands of other hip-hop artists — when they become famous. Of close friend the Notorious B.I.G., who, along with Tupac Shakur, who were shot and killed at their peak, he says: “They were both perfectly safe before they started rapping; they weren’t being hunted by killers until they got into music. Biggie was on the streets before he started releasing music, but he never had squads of shooters (or the Feds) coming after him until he was famous.”
He recalls meeting with Eminem in the studio in 2003 to record “Moment of Clarity” for Jay-Z’s “Black Album.” When Jay-Z went to hug his friend, he realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest. At the time, Eminem had three multiplatinum albums and a No. 1 film, “8 Mile.” Jay-Z believed Eminem should have been “on a boat somewhere” without the worry of being shot or attacked by an enemy from the underworld of rap.
Cristal Diss
Biggie first introduced Jay-Z, who says he rarely takes drugs, to Cristal Champagne in 1994. Since then, he and other hip-hop stars put the expensive drink on the map by name-checking it in their rhymes. So when Cristal’s managing director, Frederic Rouzad, was asked by a reporter if the brand was compromised by the “association with the ‘bling lifestyle’,” and he replied, “We can’t forbid people from buying it,” Jay-Z decided to boycott the brand altogether. “That was a slap in the face,” Jay-Z writes. “I released a statement saying that I would never drink Cristal or promote it in any way or serve it at any of my clubs ever again. I felt like this was the kind of bull – – – t I’d been dealing with forever, this kind of patronizing disrespect for the culture of hip-hop.”
