DECODED JAY-Z

Poetry

DECODED
JAY-Z
SPIEGEL & GRAU
NEW YORK – 2011…

TI saw the circle before I saw the kid in the middle. I was nine years old, the
summer of 1978, and Marcy was my world. The shadowy bench-lined inner
pathways that connected the twenty-seven six-story buildings of Marcy Houses
were like tunnels we kids burrowed through. Housing projects can seem like
labyrinths to outsiders, as complicated and intimidating as a Moroccan bazaar. But
we knew our way around.
Marcy sat on top of the G train, which connects Brooklyn to Queens, but not
to the city. For Marcy kids, Manhattan is where your parents went to work, if they
were lucky, and where we’d yellow-bus it with our elementary class on special
trips. I’m from New York, but I didn’t know that at nine. The street signs for
Flushing, Marcy, Nostrand, and Myrtle avenues seemed like metal flags to me:
Bed-Stuy was my country, Brooklyn my planet.
When I got a little older Marcy would show me its menace, but for a kid in
the seventies, it was mostly an adventure, full of concrete corners to turn, dark
hallways to explore, and everywhere other kids. When you jumped the fences to
play football on the grassy patches that passed for a park, you might find the field
studded with glass shards that caught the light like diamonds and would pierce
your sneakers just as fast. Turning one of those concrete corners you might bump
into your older brother clutching dollar bills over a dice game, Cee-Lo being called
out like hard­ core bingo. It was the seventies and heroin was still heavy in the
hood, so we would dare one another to push a leaning nodder off a bench the way
kids on farms tip sleeping cows. The unpredictability was one of the things we
counted on. Like the day when I wandered up to something I’d never seen before: a
cipher-but I wouldn’t have called it that; no one would’ve back then. It was just a
circle of scrappy, ashy, skinny Brooklyn kids laughing and clapping their hands,
their eyes trained on the center. I might have been with my cousin B-High, but I
might have been alone, on my way home from playing baseball with my Little
League squad. I shouldered through the crowd toward the middle-or maybe BHigh cleared the way-‘-but it felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids, no
bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star.
His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood,
an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was
transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was
mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a
trance, for a crazy long time-thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never
losing the beat, riding the handclaps. He rhymed about nothing-the sidewalk, the
benches-or he’d go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him, call
out someone’s leaning sneakers or dirty Lee jeans . And then he’d go in on how
clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him. Then he’d
just start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much
better they were than yours, how he was the best that ever did it, in all five
boroughs and beyond. He never stopped moving, not dancing, just rotating in the
center of the circle, looking for his next target. The sun started to set, the crowdmoved in closer, the next clap kept coming, and he kept meeting it with another
rhyme. It was like watching some kind of combat, but he was alone in the center.
All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him. I was
dazzled. That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.
That night, I started writing rhymes in my spiral
notebook. From the beginning it was easy, a constant flow.
For days I filled page after page. Then I’d bang a beat out
on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had a flat
surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning
until I went to sleep. My mom would think I was up
watching TV, but I’d be in the kitchen pounding on the
table, rhyming. One day she brought a three-ring binder
home from work for me to write in. The paper in the binder was unlined, and I
filled every blank space on every page. My rhymes looked real chaotic, crowded
against one another, some vertical, some slanting into the corners, but when I
looked at them the order was clear.
I connected with an older kid who had a reputation as the best rapper in
Marcy-Jaz was his name-and we started practicing our rhymes into a heavy-ass
tape recorder with a makeshift mic attached. The first time I heard our voices
playing back on tape, I realized that a recording captures you, but plays back a
distortion-a different voice from the one you hear in your own head, even though I
could-recognize myself instantly. I saw it as an opening, a way to re-create myself
and reimagine my world. After I recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable
rush to play it back, to hear that voice.
One time a friend peeked inside my notebook and the next day I saw him in
school, reciting my rhymes like they were his. I started writing real tiny so no one
could steal my lyrics, and then I started straight hiding my book, stuffing it in my
mattress like it was cash. Everywhere I went I’d write. If I was crossing a street
with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I’d break out my binder, spread it on a
mailbox or lamppost and write the rhyme before I crossed the street. I didn’t care if
my friends left me at the light, I had to get it out. Even back then, I thought I was
the best.I’m the king of hip-hop | Renewed like Reeboks | Key in the lock | Rhymes so
provocative | As long as I live
There were some real talents in Marcy. DJs started setting up sound systems
in the project courtyards and me and Jaz and other MCs from around the way
would battle one another for hours. It wasn’t like that first cipher I saw: the crowds
were more serious now and the beat was kept by eight-foot-tall speakers with
subwoofers that would rattle the windows of the apartments around us. I was good
at battling and I practiced it like a sport. I’d spend free time reading the dictionary,
building my vocabulary for battles. I could be ruthless, calm as fuck on the outside,
but flooded with adrenaline, because the other rapper was coming for me, too. It
wasn’t a Marquess of Queensberry situation. I saw niggas get swung on when the
rhymes cut too deep. But mostly, as dangerous as it felt it stayed lyrical. I look
back now and it still amazes me how intense those moments were, back when there
was nothing at stake but your rep, your desire to be the best poet on the block.
I wasn’t even in high school yet and I’d discovered my voice. But I still
needed a story to tell.
FIRST THE FAT BOYS GONNA BREAK UP
Hip-hop was looking for a narrative, too. By the time the eighties came
along, rap was exploding, and I remember the mainstream breakthroughs like they
were my own rites of passage. In 1981, the summer before seventh grade, the
Funky Four Plus One More performed “That’s the Joint” on Saturday Night Live
and the Rock Steady Crew got on ABC Nightly News for battling the Dynamic
Rockers at Lincoln Center in a legendary showdown of b-boy dance crews. My
parents watched Soul Train every Saturday when we cleaned up, but when my big
sister Annie and I saw Don Cornelius introduce the Sugar Hill Gang, we just
stopped in the middle of the living room with our jaws open. What are they doing
on TV?
I remember the 12-inch of Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” backed with “Sucker
M.C.’s” being definitive. That same year, 1983, the year I started high school,
Bambaataa released “Looking for the Perfect Beat” and shot a wild-ass video
wearing feathered headdresses that they’d play on the local access channel. Annie
and I would make up dance routines to those songs but we didn’t take it as far as
the costumes. Herbie Hancock’s “Rock” came out that year, too, and those three
records were a cultural trifecta. Disco, and even my parents’ classic R&B records,
all faded into the background. Everywhere we went there were twelve-pound boom
boxes being pulled on skateboards or cars parked on the curb blasting those
records. DJ Red Alert debuted his show on Kiss FM and Afrika Islam had a show,
“Zulu Beats,” on WHBI. The World’s Famous Supreme Team did a show you had
to catch early in the morning. Kids would make cassettes and bring them to school
to play one another the freshest new song from the night before. I’m not gonna saythat I thought I could get rich from rap, but I could clearly see that it was gonna get
bigger before it went away. Way bigger.
The feeling those records gave me was so profound that it’s sometimes
surprising to listen to them now. Like those three songs that shook my world back
in the early eighties: “Rockit” had complicated-sounding scratching by Grand
Mixer DXT, which was big for me because I wanted to be a DJ before I wanted to
be a rapper-I would practice scratching at my friend Allen’s house two mismatched
turntables mounted on a long piece of plywood. But “Rockit” had no real voice
aside from a looping synthetic one. “Looking for the Perfect Beat” was true to its
title, obsessed with beats, not lyrical content. Then there was “Sucker M.C.’s.”
From the first listen, Run-DMC felt harder than the Sugar Hill Gang or even
Kool Moe Dee and other serious battle rappers of the time. Run-DMC’s songs
were like the hardest rock you’d ever heard stripped to its core chords. Their voices
were big, like their beats, but naturally slick, like hustlers’. The rhymes were crisp
and aggressive. Run’s lyrics described the good life: champagne, caviar, bubble
baths. He rapped about having a big long Caddy, not like a Seville, a line that
seems like a throwaway, but to me felt meaningful-he was being descriptive and
precise: Run didn’t just say a car, he said a Caddy. He didn’t just say a Caddy, he
said a Seville. In those few words he painted a picture and then gave it emotional
life. I completely related. I was the kid from public housing whose whole hood
would rubberneck when an expensive car drove down the block.
Run had the spirit of a battle rapper-funny, observant, charismatic, and
confrontational-but his rhymes were more refined. When he passed the mic to his
partner, DMC followed with a story told in short strokes that felt completely raw
and honest.It was like he was looking around his hood in Queens-and around his
bedroom, his mom’s kitchen-and just calling out what he saw. But the beat and
DMC’s delivery elevated that humble life into something iconic. I’m light skinned,
I live in Queens | and I love eatin chicken and collard greens.
With that song hip-hop felt like it was starting to find its style and swagger
and point of view: It was going to be raw and aggressive, but also witty and slick.
It was going to boast and compete and exaggerate. But it was also going to care
enough to get the details right about our aspirations and our crumb-snatching
struggles, our specific, small realities (chicken and collard greens) and our livingcolor dreamscapes (big long Caddy). It was going to be real. Before Run-DMC,
rappers dressed like they were headed to supper clubs for after-dinner drinks, or in
full costume. Run-DMC looked like the streets, in denim, leather, and sneakers.
But for all of Run-DMC’s style and showmanship, there was something
missing in their songs. A story was unfolding on the streets of New York, and
around the country, that still hadn’t made it into rap, except as an absence. We
heard Melle Mel’s hit “The Message,” with its lyrics about broken glass
everywhere, and we heard about Run’s big long Caddy, but what was missing was
what was happening in between those two images-how young cats were
stepping through the broken glass and into the Caddy.
The missing piece was the story of the hustler.IF I’M NOT A HUSTLER WHAT YOU CALL THAT?
The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two
kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing
more together than they could do apart. It’s been said that the thing that makes rap
special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that
it’s built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In
poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear:
it’s the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other
sounds are on the track, even if it’s a Timbaland production with all kinds of
offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat
measure by four-beat measure. It’s like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a
rhythm that never varies and never stops.
When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you
just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum
machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat
is only one half of a rap song’s rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps
on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat
and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one.
But sometimes the flow chops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces
in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken
leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn’t like
time, it’s like life. It’s like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed
up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If the beat is time,
flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere,
but every life has to find its own flow.
Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least,
live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole
generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there’s
a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when
we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the
cats who were on the records, the content didn’t always reflect the lives we were
leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap’s signature style-the
relentless­ ness, the swagger, the complex wordplay-and the substance of the
songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow.
It had to come home.CRACK’S IN MY PALM
No one hired a skywriter and announced crack’s arrival. But when it landed
in your hood, it was a total takeover. Sudden and complete. Like losing your man
to gunshots. Or your father walking out the door for good. It was an irreversible
new reality. What had been was gone, and in its place was a new way of life that
was suddenly everywhere and seemed like it had been there forever.
Cocaine wasn’t new and neither was selling it. There had always been older
dudes who grew their pinkie fingernails out to sniff coke. There were always
down-low dealers who partied with their customers as they supplied them. Melle
Mel had a song called “White Lines (Don’t Do It)” and of course Kurtis Blow
called himself “Blow,” but for the most part doing coke was something thathappened at private parties, something you might’ve of heard about but had never
really seen. Crackheads were different. They’d smoke in hallways, on playgrounds,
on subway station staircases. They got no respect. They were former neighbors,
“aunts” and “uncles,” but once they started smoking, they were simply crackheads, the lowest on the food chain in the jungle, worse than prostitutes and almost
as bad as snitches.
Most of these fiends were my parents’ age or a little younger. They had no
secrets. Skeletal and ashy, they were as jittery as rookie beat cops and their eyes
were always spinning with schemes to get money for the next hit. Kids my age
were serving them. And these new little kamikazes, who simply called themselves
hustlers (like generations before us did), were everywhere, stacking their ones.
Fuck waiting for the city to pass out summer jobs. I wasn’t even a teenager yet and
suddenly everyone I knew had pocket money. And better.
When Biggie rhymed about how things done changed he could’ve meant
from one summer to the next. It wasn’t a generational shift but a generational split.
Look at our parents, they even fukn scared of us. With that line, Big captured the
whole transformation in a few words. Authority was turned upside down. Guys my
age, fed up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying
utility bills with money from hustling. So how could those same mothers sit them
down about a truant report? Outside, in Marcy’s courtyards and across the country,
teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. Broad-daylight shootouts had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house, and had neighbors who’d
known us since we were toddlers forming Neighborhood Watches against us.
There was a separation of style, too. Hip-hop was already moving fashion out of
the disco clubs and popularizing rugged streetwear, but we’d take it even further:
baggy jeans and puffy coats to stash work and weapons, construction boots to
survive cold winter nights working on the streets.New York wasn’t big for gang banging, but every era has its gangs, and
during my high school years it was the Decepticons, the Lo-Lifes, even girl gangs
like the Deceptinettes. Those broads would just walk up to grown men and punch
them in their faces so hard they’d drop. The proliferation of guns on the streets
added a different dynamic than the nunchucks, clackers, and kitchen knives kids
my older brother’s age used to use as weapons in their street fights. The trains were
wild. In the early eighties, before I was thirteen, you had graffiti writers tagging
trains, knocking conductors out with cans of Krylon if they tried to protect their
trains. You had
stickup kids
looking for jewelry.
Forty-fives made it
much more likely
for you to lose your
sheepskin coat-or
your life-on the A
express. So my
friends and I rolled
hard for one
another.
My man Hill
(names changed to
protect the guilty)
and I were close,
and even before we
got in the game we
were living through
the changes it
brought. I’d ride the
train all the way to
East New York
with him, he’d get
off, go see his girl,
and I’d ride back to
Marcy alone. One
time we were on
the train heading to
Hill’s chick’s house
and these niggas
across the aisle just
started ice grilling us. We were outnumbered and only had one gun between us, but
we grilled them right back. Nothing jumped off and eventually we got off the train.
East New York was one of the most serious neighborhoods in the city, so weagreed that he’d hold on to the gun when he decided to spend the night out there. I
hit the train alone to head back to Marcy. On the way back, I ran into the same
dudes. Unbelievable. I was
sitting on the train next to another young guy who just happened to be there
when they came through the car. They sat across the aisle from me. They wanted
something with me real bad, but they couldn’t figure out if the guy sitting next to
me was with me. He wasn’t. Still, I was looking at them like I’d murder them for
staring at me. When the guy next to me got off they grilled at me for a minute. It
was on. It wasn’t a rare thing to have to fight your way home. Something as
meaningless as a glance often ended up in a scuffle-and worse. You could get
killed just for riding in the wrong train at the wrong time. I started to think that
since I was risking my life anyway, I might as well get paid for it. It was that
simple.
One day Hill told me he was selling crack he was getting from a guy named
Dee Dee. I told him I wanted to be down and he took me to meet the dude. I
remember Dee Dee talking to us in a professional tone, taking his time so we’d
really understand him. He explained that hustling was a business but it also had
certain obvious, inherent risks, so we had to be disciplined. He knew that, like him,
neither of us even smoked weed, so he wasn’t worried that we’d get high off of the
work, but he wanted to stress how real the game was, that as a hustle it
required vision and dedication. We thought we had both. Plus, my friend had
a cousin in Trenton, New Jersey, doing the same thing. All we needed were
Metroliner tickets to join him. When Dee Dee was murdered, it was like something
out of a mob movie. They cut his balls off and stuffed them in his mouth and shot
him in the back of the head, execution style. You would think that would be
enough to keep two fifteen-year-olds off the turnpike with a pocketful of white
tops. But you’d be wrong.
songs about baseheads and black steel. These songs were exciting and
violent, but they were also explicitly “conscious,” and anti-hustling. When NWA’s
Straight Outta Compton claimed everything west of New Jersey, it was clear they
were ushering in a new movement. Even though I liked the music, the rhymes
seemed over the top. It wasn’t until I saw movies like Boyz n the Hood and
Menace II Society that I could see how real crack culture had become all over the
country. It makes sense, since it came from L.A., that the whole gangsta rap
movement would be supported cinematically. But by the time Dre produced The
Chronic, the music was the movie. That was the first West Coast album you could
hear knocking all over Brooklyn. The stories in those songs-about gangbanging
and partying and fucking and smoking weed-were real, or based on reality, and I
loved it on a visceral level, but it wasn’t my story to tell.IT’S LIKE THE BLUES, WE GON RIDE OUT ON THIS ONE
As an MC I still loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming, purely for the
aesthetics of the rhyme itself-the challenge of moving around couplets and triplets,
stacking double entendres, speed rapping. If it hadn’t been for hustling, I would’ve
been working on being the best MC, technically, to ever touch a mic. But when I
hit the streets for real, it altered my ambition. I finally had a story to tell. And I felt
obligated, above all, to be honest about that experience.
That ambition defined my work from my first album on. Hip-hop had
described poverty in the ghetto and painted pictures of violence and thug life, but I
was interested in something a little different: the interior space of a young kid’s
head, his psychology. Thirteen-year-old kids don’t wake up one day and say,
“Okay, I just wanna sell drugs on my mother’s stoop, hustle on my block till I’m so
hot niggas want to come look for me and start shooting out my mom’s living room
windows.” Trust me, no one wakes up in the morning and wants to do that. To tell
the story of the kid with the gun without telling the story of why he has it is to tell
a kind of lie. To tell the story of the pain without telling the story of the rewardsthe money, the girls, the excitement-is a different kind of evasion. To talk about
killing niggas dead without talking about waking up in the middle of the night
from a dream about the friend you watched die, or not getting to sleep in the first
place because you’re so paranoid from the work you’re doing, is a lie so deep it’s
criminal. I wanted to tell stories and boast, to entertain and to dazzle with creative
rhymes, but everything I said had to be rooted in the truth of that experience. I
owed it to all the hustlers I met or grew up with who didn’t have a voice to tell
their own stories-and to myself.
My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the
story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the
streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People
sometimes say that now I’m so far away from that life-now that I’ve got businesses
and Grammys and magazine covers-that I have no right to rap about it. But how
distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that
part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.
I lost people I loved, was betrayed by people I trusted, felt the breeze of
bullets flying by my head. I saw crack addiction destroy families-it almost
destroyed mine-but I sold it, too. I stood on cold corners far from home in the
middle of the night serving crack fiends then balled ridiculously in Vegas; I went
dead broke and got hood rich on those streets. I hated it. I was addicted to it. It
nearly killed me. But no matter what, it is the pace where I learned not just who I
was, but who we were, who all of us are. It was the site of my moral education, as
strange as that may sound. It’s my core story, and just like you, just like anyone,
that core story is the one that I have to tell. I was a part of a generation of kids who
saw something special about what it means to be human-something bloody and
dramatic and scandalous that happened right here in America-and hip-hop was ourway of reporting that story, telling it to ourselves and to the world. Of course, that
story is still evolving-and my life is, too-so the way I tell it evolves and expands
from album to album and song to song. But, the story of the hustler was the story
hip-hop was born to tell-not its only story, but the story that found its voice in the
form and, in return, helped grow the form into an art.
Chuck D famously called hip-hop the CNN of the ghetto, and he was right,
but hip-hop would be boring as the news if all MCs did was report. Rap is also
entertainment-and art. Going back to poetry for a minute: I love metaphors, and for
me hustling is the ultimate metaphor for the basic human struggles: the struggle to
survive and resist, the struggle to win and to make sense of it all.
This is why the hustler’s storythrough hip-hop-has connected
with a global audience. The
deeper we get into those
sidewalk cracks and into the
mind of the young hustler trying
to find his fortune there, the
closer we get to the ultimate
human story, the story of
struggle, which is what defines
us all.