Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Jay-Z · S1 E1
Marcy Projects
Born Shawn Corey Carter in Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, and the housing project that shaped everything
Marcy Houses, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, 1975. A six-year-old named Shawn Carter wakes up in a cramped apartment on the sixth floor of a housing project where the elevators are broken and the stairwells smell like piss, and he won't leave this building for another fifteen years.
"Where I'm From" (Jay-Z, 1997). The music video was shot in and around Marcy Projects. Before the Roc-A-Fella empire, before the Grammys, before Beyoncé, there was this: a concrete block in Brooklyn that made everything else possible. Press play.
560 State Street
Marcy Houses is a public housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn: 27 buildings, over 4,000 residents, built in 1949 and named after former New York governor William L. Marcy. By the 1970s, Marcy was one of the roughest projects in New York City. Crack hadn't arrived yet, but poverty, violence, and a total absence of opportunity had. Shawn Corey Carter was born there on December 4, 1969, the youngest of four children raised by Gloria Carter.
Sources
Carter, Shawn. "Decoded." Spiegel & Grau, 2010.
Greenburg, Zack O'Malley. "Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office." Portfolio/Penguin, 2011.
“I grew up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and my mom and pop had an extensive record collection, so Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and all of those sounds and souls of Motown filled the house.”
— Jay-Z
TAP TO REVEAL: What did young Shawn Carter do when he couldn't afford a notebook?
Where I'm From, Jay-Z (1997)
"Where I'm From" is built on a dark, minimal loop that sounds like a hallway with the lights out. The production by Ski Beatz creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that mirrors the projects: no space, no escape, just walls closing in. Jay-Z's flow is measured and precise, rattling off details about Marcy with the specificity of someone who memorized every crack in the sidewalk. Listen for how he never raises his voice. The calm is the point. He's not angry about where he's from. He's just telling you exactly what it was.
Sources
Carter, Shawn. "Decoded." Spiegel & Grau, 2010.
Marcy Houses
The public housing project at Marcy Avenue and Flushing Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Jay-Z grew up. These 27 buildings produced one of the most successful artists and entrepreneurs in American history.
Marcy by the Numbers
Marcy Me, Jay-Z (2017)
Twenty years after "Where I'm From," Jay-Z returns to Marcy Projects on 4:44. "Marcy Me" is a grown man looking back at the place that built him, with the distance that only success can provide. The production is warm where "Where I'm From" was cold, reflective where the original was defiant. The same building, the same memories, but from the window of a penthouse instead of a sixth-floor walkup.
Marcy Me, Jay-Z (2017)
"Y'all think small, I think Biggie." The opening bar is a triple reference: thinking big, Biggie Smalls (his late friend), and the ambition that Marcy either gave you or crushed out of you. The lyrics move between childhood memories and present-day wealth with the ease of someone who's spent decades reconciling the two. The Marcy kid and the billionaire exist in the same sentence, and neither one cancels the other out.
What is the origin of Jay-Z's stage name?
Marcy gave Shawn Carter everything: his voice, his hunger, his edge. But when his father Adnis Reeves walks out the door one night and never comes back, it leaves a wound that no amount of money will ever fully close. Next: the absent father, and the hole at the center of every Jay-Z album.
0 XP earned this session