In the year 2003, rapper Jay-Z was sitting on top of the world. In just eight years in the music industry, he had released nine full-­length albums and collaborated on four additional albums, selling more than 30 million records. He had helped to create a business empire based in the high-­profile industries of fashion and music. His personal worth was estimated to be more than $300 million. His name was linked romantically with one of the country’s most successful and beautiful R & B singers, Beyoncé Knowles. He had started a scholarship fund, had purchased a part of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, had discovered and helped to develop countless platinum-­selling recording artists, had started a film production company, and was considered by many to be one of the best, if not the best, rapper of all time. What better time, then, to announce his retirement from the recording business? As he put it in the song “Encore” on his “retirement album,” The Black Album, “Jay’s status appears to be at an all-­time high / perfect time to say good-­bye.”

For Jay-­Z, it was time for new challenges. As he said in interviews quoted in Jay-­Z... and the Roc-­A-­Fella Records Dynasty, “If you’re not challenging yourself, you might as well be dead... I’ve had it with the rap game. Time to focus on other things. That’s why I’m retiring... Rap is a young man’s game, and I thought about that even when I was young—­it has to come to an end.”

But Jay-­Z being Jay-­Z, he wasn’t going to ride off quietly into the sunset. His retirement would be just as big as anything else in his career. First of all, there was a new CD, The Black Album, boasting an all-star roster of producers and cowriters including Kanye West, the Neptunes, Timbaland, Eminem, and Rick Rubin. The album, serving as both a summation and a farewell, sold over 463,000 copies in its first week of release, topping the Billboard 200 LP chart.

The album also received extraordinary critical acclaim. As Vibe magazine described it, “From beginning to end, The Black Album documents a marvelous career. It’s monumental because it’s a culmination of Jigga’s (one of Jay-­Z’s nicknames) natural thoughtfulness delivered with transcendent skill. . . . If the most definitive part of his legacy will be the end, then The Black Album gives you Jay-­Z at all his stages. The masterful, lyrical content leaves no question as to how Jay feels he should be remembered.”

Rolling Stone magazine joined the chorus, calling Jay-­Z, “The dominant figure of the post-­Biggie and Tupac era, he spit cool and witty with devastating flows, dropped classic albums, influenced MCs, changed pop culture and built a tall stack of dollars in the process. . . . Jay-­Z has come up with one of the better albums of his career. . . . We’ve witnessed not merely a Hall of Fame career but one of the top-­shelf greatest of all time. . . .”

The Black Album was just one part of Jay-­Z’s farewell. On November 25, 2003, Jay-­Z took over New York’s fabled Madison Square Garden, holding what was billed as his “farewell concert,” which would be filmed for later release. It was a historic moment.

It was, in fact, the first time in years that the management of Madison Square Garden had even allowed a hip-­hop concert on its stage. In part, this was due to the unsavory reputation such concerts had earned, often plagued by violence and other legal problems. But some also speculate that the Garden management simply felt that hip-hop concerts couldn’t pull in a large enough audience to fill the 20,000-plus seat arena.

As it turned out, both concerns were completely unwarranted. When tickets went on sale for the concert, the first hip-hop concert to be held in the Garden in nearly 15 years, tickets sold out in less than five minutes. As Kevin Lyles, president of Warner Music is quoted as saying in the release film of the concert, entitled Fade to Black, “I don’t know of another artist who could sell out the Garden in a day.” And the show itself went off without a hitch.

The lucky attendees saw the best that hip-­hop had to offer. Coming out in support of Jay-­Z was a veritable galaxy of guest performers, including R. Kelly, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott, Ghostface Killah, Foxy Brown, Pharrell Williams, the Roots (who played as his backing band), Beanie Sigel, and to no one’s surprise, Jay’s longtime girlfriend, Beyoncé Knowles. Special appearances were made by Voletta Wallace, the mother of the late rapper Notorious B.I.G., and Afeni Shakur, the mother of the late rapper Tupac Shakur.

Despite the guest stars, the evening was all about Jay-­Z. As CNN correspondent and Rolling Stone writer Touré said, “He’s still the main attraction. Nobody can blot out the sun that is Jay-­ Z.” Changing his outfit five times in the course of the concert, he ran through a song list that included not just material from The Black Album, but songs from his entire career. That night, in his first appearance at Madison Square Garden, for the two and half hours he performed, he made the world-­famous arena his own.

The interesting thing is, because of all the work it took to put the concert together and make it run smoothly, Jay-­ Z didn’t really have time to realize just how huge the concert actually was. As he said in an interview with www.latinoreview.com, “I couldn’t feel it at the time. It took for me to watch the movie to really say like ‘Wow, that was huge.’ Because at the time, like I said, with such little rehearsal time, I’m focused on what’s coming on next. I was just focused on what was going on, the technical aspect of it, the emotional aspect kicked in later when I looked at it. I was like, ‘This is crazy.’ When I saw the first 15
minutes, that’s when I was blown away.”

How could he not be blown away? He’d come a long way from the Marcy Houses and the mean streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. As he said shortly after the Madison Square Garden concert, “This is a journey for a kid from Brooklyn to play the biggest stage in the world. This was much bigger than that. It was inspiration also, because of where I come from and the fact that I couldn’t get a deal in the beginning. It just became this thing.” As his long-­time friend and protégé Memphis Bleek said in the film Fade to Black, “I’ve known Jay all my life. We come from Marcy Projects. We lived off food stamps. . . . It’s like going from the bottom to the Promised Land.”

It is because of where Jay-Z comes from that his extraordinary success is so unlikely. As he often tells the groups of students he’s asked to address, “I came from nothing to owning my own company. It’s real and it can happen and it’s a long shot. They say when you play with skill, good luck happens.”

As Jay-­Z knows all too well, it is a long shot. Growing up black and poor in one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods, it takes a lot more than just “playing with skill.” It takes drive, determination, and a fierce will to succeed to overcome the obstacles that life put in Jay-­Z’s path.

Abandoned by his father at an early age, Jay-­Z turned to selling drugs as a way to success. When getting a recording contract proved difficult, he and his partners formed their own company, Roc-­A-­Fella Records, to distribute albums themselves. Even after achieving success as a rapper, he had to contend with the possibility of imprisonment on assault charges, legal suits, and feuds with other rappers, as well as personal tragedies. Each of these alone would be enough to stop most people. But through it all, he persevered, only to announce his retirement as a recording artist while standing at the peak of his career.

How did he do it? How did the man who was born Shawn Carter escape the dead-end life of a street hustler to become Jay-­Z, hip-­hop artist extraordinaire and multimillionaire? How did he create an ever-expanding business empire? What would be his next step? Would he be able to give up the fame and adulation that comes from being a hip-­hop star and turn his back forever on the recording studio?

Who, in other words, is Jay-­Z?