Jay-Z Out of Joint
A Biography (Sort Of)
by Rob Stiles
Chapter 1:
You Can’t Handcuff What You Can’t Snuff
“We should be fuckin’ dead now, my friend! We just witnessed a miracle, and I want you to fuckin’ acknowledge it!”
- Jules Winnfield
Remember the scene in Pulp Fiction where Butch Coolidge deliberately tries to run over Marsellus Wallace? Butch is driving around town and when he stops at a crosswalk, he happens to see Marsellus walking with a box of a dozen donuts. Butch floors it and Marsellus goes flying over his car, but then Butch gets T-boned by some other car in the intersection.
When Marsellus regains consciousness, he sees it’s Butch in the car, so Marsellus angrily pulls out his .45 automatic to shoot him and proceeds to shoot a nearby woman in the stomach instead.
That’s the best metaphor I can find to sum up Jay-Z’s life and personal relationships.
Even then, I’m not sure whether he would be Butch or Marsellus. I’m inclined to say Jay-Z is the Butch Coolidge of hip-hop, because he tends to make use of his friends for his own benefit. Despite his magnanimous millionaire image, Jay has a noted history of deliberately putting his friends in terrible situations, as if he’s made it his life’s work to give truth to the 1957 classic Mills Brothers song, “You Always Hurt The One You Love.”
Hov’s hurtful past isn’t noted in the sense that legal records documenting all of Jay-Z’s wacky hijinks actually exist. His criminal record has his name at the top and is mostly blank thereafter. Historically, the people closest to Jay-Z almost always ended up going to bat for him when shit hit the fan. Most of them got hit by the pitch.
For Jay-Z, it all started at the age of 12, when he shot his crack-addict brother for stealing his jewelry. Never mind the fact that by then, Jay-Z himself was already selling crack, possibly because there wasn’t a father figure in his life to put a shoe on him and set him straight. For all we know, Jay could’ve sold his brother the same crack vial that inspired him to steal the jewelry in the first place.
That’s the typical M.O. for drug addicts (and drug dealers, sometimes one and the same): they never think anything is really their fault. They can set themselves up for an unmitigated disaster and have the audacity to play the victim afterwards.
The only exception to this rule that I can think of is a homeless lady named Beverly, who used to come around my apartment building when I was growing up. Beverly, like Jay-Z’s brother, was definitely addicted to something. It actually might have been crack. She would come by every two weeks trying to score a few bucks for a 40-ounce, cigarettes, or what have you, but as an adult I now realize she was likely saving up to buy more crack. But she was always really grateful, sometimes a bit too much. Sometimes we didn’t have any cash on hand to give her, and you know what happened? She was still grateful and just kept walking down the block.
Had Jay-Z been there, he might’ve been liable to hand Beverly a $5 bill before shooting her in the face.
Take a step back and realize that it’s not such a farfetched premise: a pre-pubescent Hov, showing off his gold-plated baby necklace around his drug-addled brother, figured a Marsellus Wallace-level reaction was appropriate when the inevitable happened after months of selling the very same drug that his brother’s addicted to.
What the hell did Jay-Z think would happen? It’s not like him getting robbed just fell outta the fucking sky. He’s selling crack! A 12-year-old (or anyone, for that matter) really has no business wearing jewelry while selling crack or hanging around crack addicts. You don’t have to grow up in the Marcy Projects to know that’s begging to have your jewelry strong-armed from you — it’s just common sense.
Why do you think there are so many pawn shops in the more colorful, druggy parts of town? It’s not because crack addicts are really into antiquing.
Shooting his brother began a pattern of self-victimization that Jay would perpetuate throughout his adult life. One would think that by the time his kiddy testicles dropped, Jay would’ve remembered this and countless other examples from his childhood of how flying off the handle never pays off, much in the same way that putting your face on a hot iron as a child doesn’t make it any less hot when you’re an adult. He might’ve also learned that it wasn’t the hot iron’s fault, but rather his own. But Jay-Z dropped out of high school, so his grasp of thermodynamics is shaky, at best.
Possibly the most important person to ever go to bat for Jay-Z’s recklessness was Calvin “Klein” Bacote, one of Jay’s closest associates before he ever had a record deal. In 1989, Klein was acquitted of murder and started working on founding a label with Biz Markie and Jay’s mentor Jaz-O. Their first signed artist was going to be Jay-Z, so in retrospect Klein’s label was poised to be the original Roc-A-Fella Records.
Klein’s plans were ruined a scant 45 days after his acquittal, when he and Jay were attending a party in Maryland. Out of the fuckin’ blue, as is liable to happen with Jay-Z, everything went south. Reports of what exactly happened at the party are unclear, but it seems that Jay-Z pulled a gun out and some of the other partygoers were packing heat, too, so it led to a 200-person standoff.
It was totally Jay’s fault, but the unfair reality is that broken windows have been blamed for more shit than Jay-Z ever has.
In March 1982, noted White-people publication The Atlantic put out an article titled “Broken Windows” talking about how the State of New Jersey created a Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program to try and reduce crime. Some egghead researchers found that if a window in a building is broken and never gets repaired, all the other windows in the building will also get broken by the people who live in the community, because obviously nobody gave a fuck about that first window, and breaking windows is fun.
Hence, the broken windows theory: a single broken window gives people in the ghetto carte blanche to destroy their own environment, because why not? However, I’ve personally driven (speeding) through Camden, New Jersey and can say that this theory is total horseshit, because all the windows in Camden are broken to begin with. There’s pretty much nothing left to break. Camden also doesn’t have much of a police presence — it’s basically the Wild West.
Jay-Z was surrounded by broken windows in his youth, because the Marcy Projects is a government housing project, and no sensible person is going to pay money out-of-pocket to fix something that doesn’t belong to them. This is especially true with things that belong to the government. Fuck the government.
Therefore, according to the broken windows theory, anything bad Jay-Z does can’t really be his fault. He’s just a product of his environment.
After the ruckus started at the party, the cops showed up and everybody started to scatter, but Jay-Z and Klein were apprehended. Jay and Klein ended up catching a case of assault, assault to maim, and assault with a deadly weapon. All these charges stemmed from one of the more fragile (or “bitch-made”, to use the street parlance) party-goers, who probably figured they could make a quick buck off of the whole situation.
With all of these charges, Jay and Klein were going to get buried beneath the prison with a 40-year sentence when Klein, in his infinite wisdom, realized Jay-Z would never have a rap career if he spent the majority of his life getting bufu’d in the pokey. So Klein paid $50,000 to the dude pressing charges to have Jay dropped from the case entirely.
Jay-Z went on to start his rap career while Klein spent the next 4 years in prison, clinging to the soap for dear life, before getting out on an appeal. Tragically, the Feds were waiting for Klein when he was released because he had made $26 million selling weed throughout the northeast seaboard. Klein was also suffering from an acute case of being Black the day he was released, so he was promptly bussed to a Federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison, where he stayed until 2004.
Without Klein’s taking one for the team (pause), Jay-Z as we know him today wouldn’t exist. But, like most great stories, it doesn’t end there.
One might imagine that Jay-Z would be grateful to Klein for doing the heavy lifting, spending upwards of a decade getting bufu’d in jail so Jay could have a chance at a rap career.
And you’d be right: you’re imagining it.
2004, when Klein was released from prison, was about the same time Jay-Z sold his Roc-A-Fella Records label to the most famous Tall Israeli of all, Lyor Cohen. Jay wasn’t in a bad way when it came to money by any stretch of the imagination. One of the first phone calls Klein received when he came home was actually from Jay, who told Klein, “Fall back, I got you,” implying that Jay would help Klein get back up on his feet monetarily. Word on the street at the time suggested that Jay-Z was giving Klein a million bucks, no strings attached.
The reality is that the check never came. But to Jay’s credit, he did mention Klein in that one line on “Allure.” So there’s that.
“I never felt more alive than riding shotgun in Klein’s green 5…”
It becomes even harder to believe that Jay-Z is a principled human being when considering Klein, the single reason why Jay-Z exists, once alleged that Jay is a bit of a fraud. Said Klein, in a 2007 interview:
“In the 80’s, Jay wasn’t trying to be a drug dealer. He was tryna be a rapper, but in order for him to transcend himself into this hell of a dude, he had to take characters from the 80’s like myself … I give him 10% of his life that he talked about; I gotta give him something, [laughs]. He is from Brooklyn, he lived in Marcy Projects, his name is Shawn Carter, he got that right.”
Damn.
Klein’s allegations mesh with what I had previously reported on my blog during the trial of Ra Diggs, a rapper and high-ranking member of the Bloods gang. During the trial, Diggs’ henchman Saquan Wallace testified that Diggs often cross-dressed as a woman to run up on rival drug dealers. Brain-damaged rapper Uncle Murda (seriously, he has a bullet lodged in his brain) also testified that Ra Diggs and other rappers have “male groupies.”
Pause x infinity.
In order to maintain the appearance of a hardened gangster, rich rapper, and heterosexual man, Diggs had to borrow his girlfriend’s car all the time, hold recording sessions at the crack of dawn to get discounted rates at studios, and spend thousands of dollars he didn’t have on bottle services at the club, according to Uncle Murda.
The Ra Diggs trial essentially revealed that some of the most gangster rappers are fakes and/or secretly on the down-low, and that you can never really tell anymore. Who’s to say Jay-Z isn’t one of these down-low rappers, greedily holding onto his money to maintain an image of heterosexual richness? Not Klein, that’s for sure.
In the same interview in 2007, Klein also noted that Jay-Z’s greed is unlimited. Klein stated that Tyran “Ty Ty” Smith, one of Jay’s childhood friends and close associates, hadn’t even seen $1 million yet from working with Jay. This was despite the fact that Ty Ty had started working together with Jay-Z back in 1996.
Klein also stated that Ty Ty had only recently managed to move his mom out of the ghetto in 2005. Moving your mom out of the ghetto is pretty much the longest-running benchmark that men in hip-hop can measure their success against, for some reason. You could be dead broke and not sell a single record, but if your mom’s house isn’t owned by the government, that somehow solidifies your place in the top 1% of rappers. Never mind the fact that many a rapper (Jay-Z included) has rapped about having cars, women, guns, and money. All of that doesn’t really matter. That’s the beauty of hip-hop: it’s equal opportunity, in a sense.
Unless you’re White. A White rapper / part-time Scooby Doo villain who paid off the principal on his mom’s mortgage has a significantly better chance at having a rap career that outlasts the average struggle rapper. That’s how Macklemore managed to go Platinum six times over. It certainly wasn’t based on artistic merit — his accountants and public relations team are just that damn good.
About a year before moving his mom out of the ghetto, Ty Ty caught a case for pepper-spraying noted child abuser R. Kelly in the face at Madison Square Garden, during Jay-Z & R. Kelly’s Best of Both Worlds tour. At first I wanted to give Ty Ty the benefit of the doubt, because he stands at about 5-feet-even and has the same build as a teenage boy, and R. Kelly may have been trying to piss on him like he did with that one underage girl. If that were the case, Ty Ty would’ve been justified for pepper-spraying R. Kelly in the face, because what was he supposed to do, just sit there and get pissed on?
This incident also begs the question as to whether forcing pedophiles and sex offenders to live a certain number of miles away from school zones does anyone any good. People like R. Kelly are still free to run into someone like Ty Ty at the supermarket or something, where he might feel the urge to piss on them.
R. Kelly videotaped that time he pissed on an underage girl, much in the same way a serial killer might make gloves from the skin from his victims as a keepsake. With the advent of the GoPro portable camera and its piss-resistant plastic housing, R. Kelly may very well be out there right now trying to relive his golden years (no pun intended) wherever children or adults with child-like builds are found. In short, no one is safe.
In this case, the custodians at Madison Square Garden were thisclose to being forced to wonder if mopping up R. Kelly’s piss was somehow Jay-Z’s fault, because janitors typically don’t read The Atlantic and thus are more likely to put Jay-Z on notice for his bullshit.
Thankfully, Ty Ty was there to go to bat for Jay-Z. R. Kelly wanted to stick Jay for $75 million in a lawsuit alleging that Ty Ty “acted on instructions and authorization from Jay-Z,” and R. Kelly was also upset about getting cut from the tour.
Apparently if you miss 3 shows in a row you can get shit-canned from your own tour, but R. Kelly was unaware of this. He may have been too busy pissing on people to actually perform at his own show. In any partnership, one person tends to do more of the heavy lifting than the other, which may be why R. Kelly’s lawyer described the Best of Both Worlds tour as something that was “supposed to be the perfect marriage of hip-hop and R&B. Instead, it’s going to be a terrible divorce.” Pause.
Ty Ty ended up copping a plea and took two days of anger management courses to avoid jail time and settle the lawsuit. Jay-Z kept his riches, and R. Kelly is somewhere out there in America pissing on someone. Justice was served, one assumes.
There are really only a handful of times when Jay-Z has tried to handle shit on his own, but they’ve always ended in tragedy.
In the winter of 1999, for example, Jay caught wind that there were already bootleg copies of his fourth album, Vol. 3 … Life and Times of S. Carter, floating around on the streets. Word on the street was that producer Lance “Un” Rivera’s interns were the ones making all the bootlegs.
I haven’t done the research, but I’m willing to bet that the streets have been an accurate source of information a total of zero times. In fact, Calvin “Klein” Bacote can attest to this.
One evening, Jay-Z arrived around midnight at a listening party for Amplified, Q-Tip’s first album since A Tribe Called Quest — the best rap group ever — broke up. The party was being held at the Kit Kat Klub, or “The KKK” for short. It’s sad that the irony was completely lost on Q-Tip — he, a Black rapper, was hosting a party inside a club named after a White people’s club with an affinity for lynching Black people. How a Black person could expect anything good to come from being inside a club called “The KKK” is beyond me. Maybe they had really good food or buxom waitresses, both of which tend to attract a certain segment of the Black male population.
About 10 witnesses claimed that Jay-Z and his posse entered The KKK through a special celebrity entrance, at which point Jay saw Rivera in the club, channeled his inner Marsellus Wallace, and stabbed Rivera with a 9-inch blade.
All mayhem broke loose in the club, during which time Q-Tip got hit in the face. The New York Daily News reported that by the end of the melee, Q-Tip was crying onstage.
I would speculate that having his solo album debut ruined when Jay-Z stabbed another man is the single reason why Q-Tip wasn’t able to release any good music until nearly a decade later in 2008, with the appropriately titled The Renaissance. Even though his legacy was already secured with his work in ATCQ, we still could’ve heard a decade of Q-Tip solo albums, had Jay-Z not stabbed another man at Q-Tip’s party based on “word on the street”.
Jay eventually got off with a few years’ probation, because God forbid you actually punish the man.
Still, ruining a decade’s worth of potential Q-Tip albums is probably the most overlooked way in which Jay-Z has failed hip-hop and America. I’d go so far as to argue that it’s worse than the hundreds of years of Black slavery in America, if only because Americans still have a very real opportunity to collectively sue their oppressor for reparations. Jay-Z, unlike Thomas Jefferson, is still alive, and it’s not like he doesn’t have the money.
In 2002, Suge Knight aired out the biggest and most overlooked piece of Jay-Z’s dirty laundry in an interview on Last Call with Carson Daly.
I’m not sure if Suge had accomplished something in his career at the time that warranted an appearance on a late-night talk show, or if the show was just desperate for guests. This would imply that Suge Knight had, at some point in time, accomplished things. Suge’s accomplishments are few and far between, and primarily consist of A) getting shot, and B) having people murdered.
I’ve done the math, and it turns out that Suge Knight gets shot once every 9 years. It also turns out that Suge’s propensity for getting shot is closely related to his insatiable bloodlust.
For instance, back when N.W.A. was splitting up, Eazy-E and Dr. Dre were in the midst of a beef. Suge wanted to bring Dre on as a founding member of Suge’s nascent Death Row Records label, but Dre was already signed to Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records. Because of this, Eazy-E had control over Dre’s publishing rights. Rather than try to strike a business deal with Eazy-E or handle things diplomatically, Suge called a meeting with Eazy to which Suge brought a couple of hired thugs with metal pipes. If the conspiracy theories are to be believed, Suge also had Eazy-E “dealt with” by having the Jewish Defense League and/or the Nation of Islam inject him with AIDS.
Allegedly.
In a way, Jay-Z and Suge Knight are similar in their ability to fly off the handle at any given moment. The only difference is that Jay tends to shoot or stab people himself, whereas Suge and any rappers within a half-mile radius of him are the ones getting shot.
Suge began his streak of getting shot once every 9 years in 1996. Tupac was signed to Suge’s Death Row Records, and his career was blowing up like the World Trade (too soon?). Tupac was about ready to leave the label, a problem for which Suge figured the obvious solution was murder. On the night of September 7, Suge just so happened to be driving Tupac to Club 662 in Las Vegas when, all of a sudden, their car was caught in a drive-by shooting. Suge took some bullet fragments to his head, while Tupac ended up dying.
It’s only recently been revealed that Tupac’s dying words were “fuck you,” which were supposedly in response to a cop asking him who shot him. Thinking about it now, how do we know Suge Knight wasn’t just standing right behind the cop, and Tupac was actually saying “fuck you” to Suge for having orchestrated his murder?
I’m just asking questions!
In 2005, Suge got shot a second time while attending a pre-VMA Awards party at Kanye West’s house. Suge was shot in the leg and also robbed of his diamond earrings, and he went on to sue Kanye for the cost of the earrings while declaring bankruptcy in 2008.
Like Ra Diggs, Suge Knight has some known connections with the cross-dressing Bloods gang, and he was really hung up on getting his women’s jewelry back. Ipso facto, Suge might be on the down-low. Why else would Suge have as many baby mommas as he does?
In 2014, Suge got shot a third time at noted wife-beater Chris Brown’s pre-VMA Awards party. He took six bullets to the arm and stomach but somehow, of his own volition, managed to walk out of the club the party was being held at and sit down on the curb until someone called an ambulance.
Suge’s next shooting is scheduled for sometime around the 2023 VMA Awards. If the current trend continues, he’ll get shot up like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface, then walk to the nearest IHOP and eat a Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity before dialing 911 himself.
When Suge managed to find enough time between getting shot and murdering rap legends to appear on Last Call with Carson Daly in 2002, he used it as an opportunity to go in on Jay-Z. Carson asked Suge if he liked Jay’s music, to which Suge couldn’t give a coherent answer, what with the bullet fragments still lodged in his brain after orchestrating Tupac’s murder.
Suge went on to recount a story he was told about a time when Jay-Z visited Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg in Los Angeles. Jay had previously written Dre’s verses on the song “Still D.R.E.,” and as thanks Dre and Snoop told Jay that they would handle his accommodations in L.A.
One evening, Jay was relaxing in his hotel, when Suge alleges some gentlemen kicked down the door and Jay was “taped up, robbed, and gagged.” Suge also alleged that the only person who knew where Jay-Z was staying was Snoop Dogg.
The only way Suge Knight’s story could be any better is if it was Dr. Dre who bound and gagged Jay-Z. It would make the story that much more compelling, given the questionable outfits Dr. Dre was wearing in the ‘80s as part of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. There’s no solid evidence to suggest Dre moved past this phase in his life, if it was in fact just a “phase,” because he most recently released “Hello Kitty” Beats by Dre headphones. He might just be senile, at this point.
If Suge’s story is true, Snoop Dogg’s putting a really kinky shoe on Jay-Z kinda blows a hole (pause) through Jay’s entire image of a street-wise hustler.
Think about it: your common household dog can usually “smell” danger, so they’ll bark at a woman you bring home from the bar if she happened to give an ex-convict a blowski earlier that evening. I’d imagine that a bona fide gangster like Jay-Z would have that same ability, but then again he’s shot and stabbed people at times when there was neither clear nor present danger. Maybe Jay-Z is like Old Yeller and needs to be taken out behind a barn for an “adjustment,” so to speak.
More importantly, doing some bondage with Snoop confirms everything that was revealed at the Ra Diggs trial. Your favorite rappers are likely to either be cross-dressing fruits or otherwise enjoy getting bound and gagged. But because of the homophobic sensibilities rooted so deeply in hip-hop, they’re forced to put on the appearance of hardened street veterans while staying on the down-low.
This explains why Jay-Z often defaults to Marsellus Wallace-level reactions — he’s just overcompensating, emulating how he thinks most hetero men would react in a given situation. A simpler and less violent way would’ve been for Jay to buy a pickup truck, but pickup trucks have never been considered particularly gangster.
This was only the case until just recently, now that Suge Knight has run over 2 people in a pickup truck and killed one of them. Jay-Z might have to up the ante.
There are two important conclusions that are buried beneath all these stories.
First, Tupac pretty much called all of Jay-Z’s bullshit in 1996 on “Bomb First,” the opening track of The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, which came out about 5 months after Jay-Z’s debut album Reasonable Doubt.
In the intro, Tupac puts Jay-Z on notice for a weak-ass cameo he did in the music video for Jaz-O’s 1989 single, “Hawaiian Sophie.” In the music video, around the 40-second mark, Jay-Z magically floats down from the sky wearing a Hawaiian t-shirt before getting a flowery necklace placed around his neck by a hula dancer.
It’s a terrible music video even by 1989 standards, and at one point it features an oiled-up muscular black man who buries Jaz-O’s face in his chest. This was way higher than the acceptable number of oiled-up muscular black men who should ever be featured in a rap music video, which is zero.
The entire premise of “Hawaiian Sophie” is definitively not gangsta, because it’s all about how Jaz-O spends way too much effort getting into fistfights with other guys, all so he can get with some girl named Sophie. So for all intents and purposes, Jay-Z let Klein spend about a decade getting bufu’d in prison for him, just so that Jay could stand around in the least-gangster music video for arguably the least-gangster rap song ever.
After all that, did Jay-Z really expect to turn around and rap on Reasonable Doubt about being a Mafioso who doesn’t give a fuck about broads, who can indiscriminately shoot and stab people, without having his credibility called into question?
Nuh uh. Tupac don’t play that shit.
You know on some level that it’s true, because Jay-Z never even bothered to address Tupac’s point on “Bomb First.” He’s just conceded the point like, “Yeah, mine was probably the weakest introduction into hip-hop in recorded history.”
And secondly, when you step back and take a look at it all, it becomes clear that Jay-Z is neither the Butch Coolidge nor Marsellus Wallace of hip-hop. Jay-Z is really The Gimp. He is quiet as kept in his little box, wearing a leather bodysuit and mask with the mouth-zipper, save for those occasions when he trots himself out to release an album, or society cuts him loose from any and all responsibility. Someday, a Butch Coolidge will come around and end up snuffing him with a punch to the face.
Jay-Z Out of Joint is a serialized, unauthorized biography about Jay-Z. Chapters are published monthly.
Rob Stiles is the editor of HoobityBlah.com, a site dedicated to rambling commentary on hip-hop music, politics, and the plethora of amazing videos on the Internets. A person who hates his job, he spends time at work editing the Medium publication Strictly for the Heads, a collection of hip-hop music criticism, interviews and essays.
Keep up-to-date by following HoobityBlah.com on Twitter.
