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  Copyright © 2010 by Shawn Carter

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Song lyric credits are located beginning on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jay-Z.

  Decoded / Jay-Z.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60521-8

  1. Jay-Z. 2. Rap musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.J29A3 2010 782.421649092—dc22 [B] 2010015063

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  v3.1

  To Gloria Carter and Adnis Reeves

  Without your love and love for music none of this would be possible

  How to use the DECODED enhanced eBook

  Navigation

  Whenever you want to find a specific section in this eBook, go to the Table of Contents. You can then scroll through the list and click on the chapter link of your choice.

  Notes on Lyrics

  Each of the lyric sections in this eBook includes links that you can click on to read notes about the songs written by Jay-Z. Once you are done reading a note, you can navigate back to the lyrics by either:

  clicking on the footnote number at the start of the note

  clicking on the “Back to Lyrics” link at the beginning of the notes for those lyrics.

  Video

  This enhanced ebook includes video features* throughout the text. When you see an image with the Play icon, simply click the icon to start the video.

  *Video may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  How to use the DECODED eBook

  Jay Z’s Introduction

  List of Video

  Part 1: One Eye Open

  The Revolutionary T-Shirt

  Public Service Announcement (The Black Album)

  American Dreamin’ (American Gangster)

  Early This Morning (unreleased)

  Honor Among Predators

  Coming of Age (Reasonable Doubt)

  Coming of Age (Da Sequel) (Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life)

  D’Evils (Reasonable Doubt)

  Negative Space

  99 Problems (The Black Album)

  Ignorant Shit (American Gangster)

  Part 2: I Will Not Lose

  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Star

  Most Kings (unreleased)

  Success (American Gangster)

  Renegade (The Blueprint)

  Can I Live? (Reasonable Doubt)

  Balling and Falling

  Fallin’ (American Gangster)

  Big Pimpin’ (Vol. 3 … Life and Times of S. Carter)

  Streets Is Watching (In My Lifetime, Vol. 1)

  Beat the System Before It Beats You

  Operation Corporate Takeover (Mix Tape Freestyle)

  Moment of Clarity (The Black Album)

  A Stern Discipline

  Breathe Easy (Lyrical Exercise) (The Blueprint)

  My 1st Song (The Black Album)

  Part 3: Politics as Usual

  White America

  Young Gifted and Black (S. Carter Collection)

  Hell Yeah (Pimp the System) (Revolutionary But Gangsta)

  Ears Wide Open

  Beware (Jay-Z Remix) (Beware)

  Blue Magic (American Gangster)

  Cautionary Tales

  This Life Forever (Black Gangster)

  Meet the Parents (The Blueprint2: The Gift & the Curse)

  Where I’m From (In My Lifetime, Vol. 1)

  Funeral Parade

  Minority Report (Kingdom Come)

  Dynasty (Intro) (The Dynasty: Roc La Familia)

  My President Is Black (unreleased)

  Part 4: Come and Get Me

  The Voice in Your Head Is Right

  Regrets (Reasonable Doubt)

  This Can’t Be Life (The Dynasty: Roc La Familia)

  Soon You’ll Understand (The Dynasty: Roc La Familia)

  Instant Karma

  Beach Chair (Kingdom Come)

  Lucifer (The Black Album)

  Our Life

  December 4th (The Black Album)

  History (unreleased)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Notes on Lyrics

  Jay-Z's Introduction

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  Videos in This Book*

  Look for these video clips throughout the eBook or click on the links below to view them now.

  Rap Is Poetry

  A Love Affair with Something Tragic

  We All Have Nothing

  You Still Have That Stigma On You

  A World with Amnesia Won’t Forget Your Name

  On Collaboration

  Can I Live

  Life Is Slowly Taking You Away From Who You Are

  Big Pimpin’

  I Was Not a Pushover

  Moment of Clarity

  I’m a Fan of Clear Ideas

  You’re Killing Your Son

  Where I’m From

  Not Everyone Wakes Up Feeling Invincible

  Damn, I’m Gonna Be a Failure

  Did It Cost Me Too Much

  By the Third Time, They Were Singing Along

  The Evolution of My Style

  *Video may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details.

  I 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 hardcore 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 B-High 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 crowd moved 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.

  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 “Rockit” 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 say that 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 on 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 an
d 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 living-color 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.