Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Jay-Z · S1 E3
The Corner
Crack hits Brooklyn. A teenager starts dealing. The streets become a business school.
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 1985. Crack cocaine arrives on the block like a new employer, and suddenly every teenager in Marcy Projects has to decide: stay broke, or start selling.
"Can't Knock the Hustle" (Jay-Z, live on Late Show with David Letterman, 2008). The opening track of Reasonable Doubt performed on a late night stage. Watch how Jay-Z delivers a song about crack dealing with the calm confidence of a CEO giving a quarterly report. That composure was learned on the corner.
The Crack Economy
The crack epidemic hit New York City in the mid-1980s like a bomb. In neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, it destroyed families, created addicts, and simultaneously built an underground economy that offered young Black men the one thing the legitimate world wouldn't: money, fast. Shawn Carter was a teenager when it arrived. He has been open about the fact that he dealt crack for several years, describing it in Decoded as a choice made not out of greed but out of a total lack of alternatives.
Sources
Carter, Shawn. "Decoded." Spiegel & Grau, 2010.
Greenburg, Zack O'Malley. "Empire State of Mind." Portfolio/Penguin, 2011.
“At 14, 15 years old, you're not thinking about the morality of what you're doing. You're thinking about sneakers, or you're thinking about some sort of relief from all the pain you feeling. It was either you were using it or selling it, and that was pretty much the two options.”
— Jay-Z, interview with Fresh Air (NPR), November 2010
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Jay-Z learn from dealing that he later used in business?
Can't Knock the Hustle, Jay-Z feat. Mary J. Blige (1996)
"Can't Knock the Hustle" is Reasonable Doubt's opening statement: a smooth, jazz-inflected beat from Knobody, Mary J. Blige singing a silky hook, and Jay-Z rapping with the relaxed confidence of someone who's already won. The production borrows from '70s blaxploitation soundtracks, all wah-wah guitar and lush strings. Listen for how Jay's flow never rushes. He rides the beat like he's in no hurry, which is the sonic equivalent of the cool he learned on the corner. Every syllable lands exactly where it should.
Sources
Carter, Shawn. "Decoded." Spiegel & Grau, 2010.
Marcy Avenue & Flushing Avenue
The intersection outside Marcy Houses where much of the neighborhood's drug trade operated in the 1980s and early '90s. This corner is the one Jay-Z raps about on dozens of tracks. It's the classroom where he learned the business skills he'd later apply to a two-billion-dollar empire.
The Street Years
Heart of the City (Ain't No Love), Jay-Z (2001)
Built on a Bobby "Blue" Bland sample chopped by Kanye West, "Heart of the City" is Jay-Z's farewell letter to the streets. The production is warm and soulful, but the lyrics are cold: "I got enemies in the business, I got friends, of course." For an episode about the corner that made him, this Blueprint track captures the moment when the streets become a memory instead of a present tense. He got out. Most of the people he dealt with didn't.
Heart of the City (Ain't No Love), Jay-Z (2001)
"I got no love for the haters, I'm raising the stakes up." The lyric works on two levels: Jay-Z talking about his music career and Jay-Z remembering what it felt like to raise the stakes on the corner. Kanye's production flips the Bobby Bland sample into something that sounds triumphant and melancholy at the same time. The whole song lives in that tension between winning and knowing what it cost.
To which city outside of New York did Jay-Z travel to expand his drug dealing territory?
The corner is paying the bills, but Shawn Carter is still rapping. A local MC named Jaz-O hears him freestyle on a stoop and recognizes something that the drug game can't use: talent. Next: a mentor, a studio, and the first time Jay-Z hears his own voice on a record.
0 XP earned this session