Jay-Z

As he is fond of pointing out, by the time he released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt Shawn Carter was nearly 27 years old. For any artist, that’s a late start. For a rapper, it’s geriatric. Shawn Corey Carter lived a full life well before he’d become Jay-Z. But, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Those whom the gods love grow young.” And Jay-Z, well, he calls himself Jay-Hova, the God MC.

Before his rise, Shawn, or Jazzy – as close friends called him because he was “a cool guy for my age” – was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Marcy Houses projects to Gloria Carter and Adnis Reeves, “who made love under the sycamore tree,” which he told us on “December 4th.” A lanky child and good student who admired glamour and luxury from project windows, Shawn quickly sought wealth and escape, if not distance, from his roots. He never completed high school. His first, Eli Whitney High, closed while he was a freshman. Stints at George Westinghouse Career and Technical and Trenton Central High in New Jersey went unfinished. That one of the cleverest, and slipperiest linguists of his generation lacks a high school diploma isn’t so much damning of the education system, or his impoverished youth, as it is a testament to Jay’s maxi-sponge brain, which absorbs information, words, pictures and stories, and finds way to re-contextualize and layer them for his own mythmaking.

In his teens, Jay turned to drug-dealing – much-heralded in his scripture – and rap as outlets. He flirted with fame in the late ’80s and early ’90s, working with his mentor Jaz-O, doing touring duty with technical forbearer Big Daddy Kane, and slowly making inroads in an industry that mostly misunderstood his quick-witted, then-quick-lipped delivery. He befriended the Phoenix-rising MC the Notorious B.I.G. He partnered with a cocky Harlem aspirant named Damon Dash. He made the occasional across-state-lines trip with a package in the trunk to pay the bills. A guest appearance here. A stalled first single there. An unprofitable distribution deal way over there. Until finally, the formation of Roc-A-Fella, the independent record label he formed with Dash and silent money man Kareem “Biggs” Burke. Their entrepreneurial venture came only as a product of rejection from every single major label on the planet. No one see could the appeal of Jay-Z, imposing and bright, but not especially handsome or accessible; somehow he was not a star. By the time he finally made Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z had lived through struggles both professional and personal – his father left, he made and lost friends, saw some arrested and others killed, had doors closed in his face, and lost money in the game. It’s strange to imagine looking at a young Jay-Z and thinking, “No way. Not giving this guy my money.” But that’s what made him more ready than any of his contemporaries to orchestrate the kind of big-top iconography he’s accomplished. Now if only he could get it off the ground…