Jay-Z Out of Joint
A Biography (Sort Of)
by Rob Stiles
Chapter 3:
Potential Mental Losses
“Where does personality end and brain damage begin?”
— Douglas Coupland
Aging in hip-hop is a challenge that has never really been addressed, possibly because no one really cares. Hip-hop pioneers Kurtis Blow and Afrika Bambaataa are rolling into their 60s now, and they’ve been all but forgotten. Even so, they aren’t at the point where they’re drooling on-stage like the Rolling Stones, just to put food on their families. They made their impact, took their cash, and are doing whatever it is that aged hip-hop pioneers do in their twilight years. Bambaataa, for instance, is 57 years old as of this writing and serves as a visiting professor at Cornell University, so it doesn’t seem like aging is that bad.
There seems to be an unspoken cutoff age or “shelf life” for rappers, after which their rap career is effectively over. The problem lies in the fact that being a rapper is similar to being self-employed, in that unlike at most corporate jobs there’s nobody around to tell a rapper about the benefits of a 401(k) or paying their taxes on time, unless a rapper is smart enough to have an Israeli accountant in his employ.
As is often the case, a rapper will end his career with barely any money saved, or about a decade into his career will discover that he was supposed to be paying taxes that entire time. Circa 2000, for example, Fat Joe rapped on the Big L song “The Enemy” about people claiming Joe was taking money from his New York businesses for himself, without paying taxes on said money. Fat Joe later served 4 months in the pokey for not paying taxes in 2013 and paid several thousand dollars in fines.
Around 2014, Fat Joe became president of Urban and Latino development at Market America, which is essentially one of those ripoff multi-level marketing companies, where you have to pay something like $100/month to sell their shitty products to your friends. I can only assume that the impetus behind Joe’s career move was a startling realization that he has no money saved up, or a strange desire to fill his garage with umpteen boxes of Cutco Knives.
There are the less glamorous cases like Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox fame, who’s been spotted allegedly panhandling for crack money multiple times in Harlem. Sean Price, respected lyricist that he is, has performed at a baby shower in New York on at least one occasion. I can only guess that they, too, were victims of never starting a savings account or paying taxes, because why would they panhandle or perform at baby showers otherwise?
One possible answer: declining mental health.
Troi “Star” Torain, former radio personality at Hot 97.1 FM in New York, is a case study for examining the effects of aging on the brain. Although he’s not a rapper, a bit light-skinted, and doesn’t make enough money for Uncle Sam to ever sweat him evading taxes, he’s more or less cut from the same cloth as your average rapper.
Star’s career at Hot 97 consisted of the “Star and Bucwild Morning Show,” which was a morning-zoo show with no inherent intellectual value. Star’s landmark achievement on the show came in 2001, when he played sound effects of an airplane crashing and a woman screaming while he was talking on-air about the death of R&B singer Aaliyah, pretty much the day after she died. Star was fired shortly thereafter.
Despite this, Star somehow managed to land a job at Hot 97’s rival station, Power 105. Power 105 must not have been sweating Hot 97 in terms of competition, otherwise they might’ve tuned in to Hot 97 enough times to realize Star isn’t the type of person who belongs at any radio station.
In 2006, when Star was about 42 years old, he had a long-simmering beef with Hot 97’s DJ Envy, which came to a head when Star offered his listeners $500 to tell him where DJ Envy’s 4-year-old daughter went to school. Star also called DJ Envy’s part-Asian wife a “slant-eyed whore.”
He was fired shortly thereafter, but not before he compared himself to pioneering comedian Lenny Bruce. This act would later go on to be considered the single biggest insult ever directed towards Lenny Bruce.
For posterity, I’ve reproduced the bulk of Star’s comments to DJ Envy here:
“Yes, I disrespected your seed. If you didn’t hear me, I said, I would like to do an R. Kelly on your seed, on your little baby girl. I would like to tinkle on her… Oh yes, I’ll come for your kids. I will come for your kids. I finally got the information on his slant eyed, whore wife.”
A 42-year-old man waxing poetic about how he’d like to piss on a 4-year-old girl, on a nationally syndicated radio show, is a terrible thing. Officially, I’m against everything Star and other pederasts stand for.
But at the same time, the Star/DJ Envy incident was really a harbinger of terrible things yet to come. Consider the fact that Star is only marginally associated with hip-hop, and yet his mental faculties are already so far gone that he was on live radio talking about how he’d like to piss on a 4-year-old girl. One can only imagine how the mental health of a rapper like Jay-Z, neck-deep in the homophobia and misogyny of hip-hop for upwards of two decades, is going to fare as he gets older.
After getting shit-canned from 2 radio stations, Star began his own Internet radio talk show, where he basically rambles a la Glenn Beck about whatever he wants. He’s about 50 years old as of this writing. During one show in early 2014, Star claimed Jay-Z wasn’t the 44 years of age that public records state he is, but that he’s actually 50 years old. Star’s source for the secret of Jay-Z’s real age was because they were, to quote Star, “age mates.”
Pause.
Despite Star’s tendency to haphazardly string words together in the hopes of being coherent, it pains me to say that I have to agree with him on this. Even though Jay-Z isn’t actually 50 and is really 44, Jay has nevertheless shown the effects of aging on his brain in more ways than one.
The evidence of a decline in Jay-Z’s mental faculties begins with the release of his 2001 album The Blueprint, when Jay was 31 years old. The album features a 28-year-old Eminem on the song “Renegade.” In the song, Eminem contributes a verse in which he raps circles around Jay-Z, to the point that a listener might wonder whether Eminem was intentionally trying to embarrass Jay on his own album.
It’s an undeniably great verse, even for a hater like me.
You’d think Jay would be smart enough to not feature someone on his record who was going to completely outshine him. It’s kind of like when a father invites his son to play basketball, and then son starts dunking on him and throwing elbows in his face, to the point that the father begins to secretly wish he had “pulled out” all those years ago. It’s at that moment when the father unwillingly vacates his position as the dominant male of the family. It’s also the reason why old people say youth is wasted on the young.
Keep in mind that Eminem was only 3 years younger than Hov on “Renegade,” and Christ, what a difference those 3 years made. Jay just couldn’t keep up!
You’d think that after his complete shitshow of a performance on “Renegade” compared to a rapper 3 years his junior, Jay-Z would learn not to go up against younger rappers. But Jay refused to take the “L,” nor did he consider a new career that might better suit his mental abilities, like custodial work.
No, he decided to go up against yet another rapper 3 years younger than him: Nas.
The Blueprint dropped in September of 2001, about 3 months before Nas dropped the long-awaited Stillmatic. The album was long awaited only in the sense that his previous album Nastradamus was complete horseshit, and people were hoping Nas would bounce back from what some critics might call “his own personal Vietnam.”
Jay-Z decided to drop a diss record toward Nas entitled “Supa Ugly” only a few days after Stillmatic was released. In the song, Jay spends the entire third verse talking about how both he and professional basketball player Allen Iverson had made sweet, passionate love with Nas’ baby mama, Carmen Bryan.
It’s in “Supa Ugly” where one can start to draw some striking similarities between Jay-Z and the crazy shit that Star was saying about pissing on DJ Envy’s daughter.
Namely, Jay-Z raps in the song about ejaculating on Nas’ daughter’s baby carseat. Jay also implies on the track that Nas is gay, because Carmen allegedly gave Jay a blowski, and Nas probably kissed her on the mouth sometime after that. That meant Nas was gay because he was essentially kissing Jay’s dick, via the transitive property of dick sucking.
It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.
In essence, both Jay-Z’s “Supa Ugly” and Star’s rant about DJ Envy’s daughter were the products of old and damaged minds that spent too many years in the hip-hop trenches. Put another way, there’s only 2 people in history who ever truly believed in their minds that talking about how they’d piss on a 4-year-old or ejaculate on a baby’s carseat would somehow lead to a positive outcome. Their names are Star and Jay-Z, respectively.
As with Star’s rant, nothing good ever did come of Jay-Z releasing “Supa Ugly.” In fact, there’s a litany of facts demonstrating how the release of “Supa Ugly” was an all-around terrible decision.
First, Jay-Z decided to release “Supa Ugly” after Nas had already dropped Stillmatic. The second track on Stillmatic is the infamous “Ether,” which was a response to Jay’s original diss to Nas on “Takeover.” Hip-hop is anything but logical, but the order in which the diss songs were released — “Takeover” then “Ether” then “Supa Ugly” — ultimately made Jay-Z look incredibly weak rhetorically in his beef against Nas.
This is because, if one were to summarize the Jay-Z/Nas beef, Jay was first to bring up all his issues with Nas, to which Nas responded, and then Jay called him gay. That’s pretty much the worst look a rapper can have: that of a 12-year-old pubescent boy, who calls people gay when losing an argument. And yet, it’s a look that Jay believed would be great to have, by virtue of his releasing the song when and how he did.
Second, Jay-Z failed to consider that people other than himself might have opinions about his efforts vis-à-vis Nas. At the time, Hot 97’s Angie Martinez somehow managed to play “Supa Ugly” on the air without getting fired, and then surveyed listeners to see whom the public believed had made the best diss track.
“Ether” received 58% of the vote over “Supa Ugly,” partly because Jay’s track consisted of calling Nas gay and suggesting that Nas kissed Jay’s dick, which itself is kinda gay. This level of cognitive dissonance is typically only seen in court-ordered mental health patients and secretly homosexual Republicans.
It’s possible some listeners might’ve gotten a gay vibe from Jay’s track and voted for Nas simply as a matter of general principle, because being gay is worse for your career prospects in hip-hop than denying the existence of certain types of German prison camps. (Shout-out to the Tall Israelis.)
Lastly, about a day after Jay-Z dropped “Supa Ugly,” the 31-year-old rapper was forced to go on Hot 97 and issue an apology to Nas for the whole damn thing because Jay’s mom, Gloria Carter, felt that the diss was “in poor taste.”
As many a White teenager on hip-hop message boards have said before me, Shawn Carter stays losing.
There’s something to be said about the character of a rapper who gets put on notice by his own mother. It’s as if Jay-Z handed his mother a macaroni picture he worked real hard on in art class, and then was forced to watch her promptly tear it to pieces. In this case, it was probably the single most prominent example of when a Black mother’s aura of infallibility will work directly against her children. Jay-Z’s hard work in his beef with Nas was all for naught.
It’s certainly hard to bounce back from something like your mother dragging you by the ear to Hot 97 and forcing you to apologize, not only professionally but also personally. The psychological trauma from such an event is hard to measure, but it’s fair to say that Jay-Z just hasn’t been quite right in the head since then.
The impact on Jay-Z’s psyche from his mother’s disapproval of “Supa Ugly” is evident when you consider it as the marker of the precise moment when Jay experienced ego death.
The Wikipedia defines ego death as “the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of the loss of control, personal agency, and cognitive-associations.” This definition suggests that “Supa Ugly” is what contributed to Jay’s shoddy decision-making with regard to his future albums.
How else can you explain why Jay elected to follow-up The Blueprint, an album which received “5 Out of 5 Mics” in The Source, by collaborating with noted child abuser R. Kelly to make some rap/R&B crossover bullshit on The Best of Both Worlds?
Ego death was literally the only explanation I could come up with, and I do a lot of “research” for my writing.
In a way, The Best of Both Worlds is the hip-hop manifestation of Jay-Z’s newfound learned helplessness, much in the same way that women who had abusive fathers when they were young tend to be attracted towards abusive men as adults.
It seems to me that when his mother dissed “Supa Ugly,” Jay-Z felt like he was no longer in control of how he earned his mother’s approval, which meant a loss of control over his musical output, and thus control over himself. In an attempt to cope, Jay had to reorganize his psyche, such that his continued mental health became predicated on other people’s approval.
He was so traumatized by his mother’s disapproval that he was willing to surround himself with literally anyone who approved of him. Beggars can’t be choosers, as it were.
This kind of thought process is what eventually led Jay-Z to work closely with a man who pisses on children’s faces.
Jay-Z’s ego death also showed itself in other ways. If Sigmund Freud contributed anything to humanity, aside from helping make cocaine popular enough so Jay would have something to rap about, he also gave us a theory that suggests Jay is an incredibly sexually frustrated individual.
Jay-Z, Freud’s theory would suggest, has yet to resolve his psychosexual childhood conflicts. It’s not so far-fetched, considering how the frustration has manifested itself. Jay rapped about ejaculating on baby carseats and another man kissing his penis, and then started spending inordinate amounts of time in the studio with a man liable to piss on his face. If you can’t do the math on that, I can’t help you.
According to Freud, had Jay’s father been around, Jay would’ve been more preoccupied with trying to kill him and make sweet, passionate love to his mother as a method of getting approval and maintaining sanity.
Now that I think about it, Jay’s lack of an outlet for his Oedipus complex might explain why he shot his own brother and stabbed Lance “Un” Rivera. Jay had kept that frustration pent up inside for so long.
Maybe it wasn’t a conscious decision for Jay-Z to collaborate with R. Kelly, maybe he just kinda felt “drawn” to him. Either way Jay gets a pass for it, because it’s nearly impossible to blame a crazy person for much of anything. It’s the same reason why some people are considered too incompetent to stand trial.
The Best of Both Worlds was released about 6 months before Scarface’s The Fix, which in my estimation was the best album of 2002. On the Scarface album, Jay-Z is featured on the song “Guess Who’s Back,” where he seems stable enough, rapping about his usual drug-dealing fare. Listening to the track, one might start thinking that working with R. Kelly may actually have done some good for Jay-Z’s mental health, following the whole “Supa Ugly” debacle.
However, Jay-Z begins the song with a desperate plea saying, “Talk to me, man,” suggesting that maybe Jay is openly calling out for a certain absent figure in his life, or someone who wasn’t talking to him anymore. Freud might suggest Jay was calling out for his father, but I’d argue that Jay was really calling out for R. Kelly.
It’s likely that by the time The Fix came out, Jay-Z was starving for a modicum of approval from anybody, because R. Kelly pretty much stopped talking to him following the release of The Best of Both Worlds.
The two ended up going on tour together after releasing the outtakes from recording The Best of Both Worlds as a “new” (air quotes) album titled Unfinished Business in 2004. But there was some decidedly VH1 “Behind the Music”-style drama going on between the two men.
By virtue of the fact that there wasn’t actually any new material on Unfinished Business, and that R. Kelly and Jay-Z had a whole 2 years between albums to record new songs, I’m led to believe that R. Kelly had no desire to even be in the same room as Jay-Z. I can’t blame R. Kelly, because even though he may have once pissed on an underage girl, would he willingly want to associate himself with a guy who raps about ejaculating on baby carseats, aside from making two— well, who’s kidding who, one and a half — cash-grab crossover albums with him?
Even people like R. Kelly have standards.
Considering how the tour turned into a shitshow that ended with R. Kelly getting pepper-sprayed in the face by Jay-Z’s minion Ty Ty, it explains R. Kelly’s motivation to ultimately accuse Jay-Z of orchestrating the pepper-spraying. R. Kelly knew full well that he’d scorned Jay by no longer speaking to him. With that, Jay probably felt hurt, so he had R. Kelly maced out of anger and confusion.
It all makes sense when you consider that Jay-Z has shot and stabbed people over more trivial things than validating his existence.
With neither his mother nor R. Kelly to force-feed him approval, Jay languishes on the intro to “Guess Who’s Back:”
“Kanye West on the track (whoo!)
Chi-Town, what’s goin on now?
Can I talk to y’all for a minute?
Lemme talk to y’all for a minute,
Just gimme a minute of ya time baby — I don’t want much.”
Kanye West, who produced “Guess Who’s Back,” is from Chicago, as is R. Kelly. It begs the question: whom was Jay-Z really begging to talk to? Probably R. Kelly.
In that sense, the intro on “Guess Who’s Back” serves as the hip-hop version of that one scene in Say Anything…, where John Cusack is outside that one broad’s house holding a boombox over his head, blasting some sappy Peter Gabriel song. Jay-Z was making a final attempt at getting back on speaking terms, but R. Kelly ended up putting the kibosh on his relationship with Jay and the two never worked together again.
Fortunately for Jay, Kanye West was waiting in the wings to fill the void that R. Kelly left in Jay’s life. Kanye wrote a song, “Big Brother,” in which he describes his relationship with Jay-Z. The song’s lyrics make it abundantly clear why Kanye and Jay are such good friends. It only makes sense that Jay, a man who underwent ego death, would want to associate with Kanye, a man who is wholly driven by the desires of his ego. It’s like Jay has his own emotional support animal he can keep around all the time; this is especially true when you consider how Kanye should be denied entrance to most restaurants. I think it’s only in Los Angeles where restaurants will let a dog sit at the table with you, as long as you say it’s an “emotional support dog” (air quotes).
Despite having such a large ego, the lyrics to “Big Brother” also reveal some of Kanye’s cognitive dissonance. Even though Kanye would be the first person to describe how he busted his ass as an artist to eventually get signed to Roc-a-Fella Records, Kanye gives credit to Jay-Z for helping move Donda West, Kanye’s mother, out of the ghetto. Why would Kanye concede all the credit for such a monumental accomplishment to Jay-Z, considering how most rappers use moving their mother out of the ghetto as the most important benchmark for success?
It’s worth noting that Jay-Z didn’t just sign Kanye to Roc-a-Fella for his health (well, except for maybe his mental health). Jay is type of guy who might trade large lump sums of money in exchange for Kanye’s enduring friendship — he would just call it a “record deal.” And there’s nothing inherently wrong about that, because the friendship seems to be working out pretty well for him. But for everyone else, the Jay-Z/Kanye friendship sucks, because Jay hasn’t ordered “Ty Ty” Smith to pepper spray Kanye in the face even once yet. Maybe someday…
Jay-Z Out of Joint is a serialized, unauthorized biography of 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.
