Jay-Z Out of Joint
A Biography (Sort Of)
by Rob Stiles
Preface:
See Me Stressed?
“Jay-Z’s rap career and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”
– Theodore Kaczynski (I think)
Thanks to All the Killers
and the Hundred-Dollar Billers
First and foremost, I’d like to thank my mom for moving us out of the hood. Shout out to Byron Crawford and Dewan Gibson for their invaluable notes and advice, and Theotis Jones for teaching me how to draw better. Big ups to Dick Bigems, my dude Rich Medina out in Dirty Jersey, and my boy Shorty Stevens holding it down in Australia, putting those dingoes and wallabies in their place.
I also wanna shout out Stretch & Bobbito for all the classic tapes, the Philly Lo-Lifes Crew for all the man-style drinking music, El-P for the name of my blog, and my girlfriend for reading my manuscripts against all better judgment and legal advice.
Free Mumia.
There’s always an inherent risk in writing a book about a high-profile public figure, especially when they never even asked you to write it. Namely, you can get your ass sued to bejesus and back for libel.
Luckily this book isn’t about Jay-Z, per se. The majority of shit-talking herein is indeed about him, but there’s really nothing else that I find sacred, either. I’m talking shit about one of hip-hop’s biggest personalities and some of the dumb shit he’s done, while talking shit about other hip-hop figures as well, because we should Never Forget™. In that sense, this might be the book version of 9/11 — either an unsolicited attack on an American icon, or an important piece of history.
The New York Times might call it an “unauthorized biography.”
As such, is there really any need for a proper introduction as to who Jay-Z is? He’s a rapper and a business, man, and by virtue of reading this book you’ve probably already formulated your own opinion of him. This book shares my fucked up views on Jay-Z and hip-hop music in general, and I’m willing to bet that the opinions I hold of him aren’t unique to me.
My hope is that if I make this book long enough, then none of Hov’s Tall Israeli handlers will have the time nor interest to read it and sue me. Jay-Z himself is getting up there in years, so it’s entirely possible he’ll get cataracts and never be able to read my book. Plus, legend has it that he doesn’t write his rhymes down, so much like Kanye West and numerous other rappers, he wouldn’t know from good writing anyway.
Or, he might just be secretly illiterate.
I’ve addressed this before on the leading hip-hop blog of the 21st century, HoobityBlah.com (I’m shameless), but to summarize, Kanye West once published a book titled Thank You and You’re Welcome. In it, there are a bunch of copy & pasted philosophical sayings along with a lot of completely blank pages, which is how I formulated my theory that Kanye is secretly illiterate.
“Writing” (air quotes) a book is the most obvious thing you could do to try to prove you’re literate anyway, especially when all you’re really doing is copying and pasting. Jay-Z doesn’t write his rhymes down, so I’m just putting two and two together.
And I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think it can be considered libel if it’s math. Worst-case scenario, my homeowner’s insurance might cover my defense attorney fees.
The way I look at it, this is America, so I should be able to exercise the freedom to shit-talk that comes with being a somewhat anonymous blogger on the Internet. Granted, I haven’t done the greatest job in covering up my identity, aside from using a pseudonym, because my real last name is a bit of a train wreck. Jay-Z could end up sending a couple of non-descript-looking vans around my neighborhood. Thank god the housing development finally got that gated entrance working.
I could take solace in the fact that Ted Kaczynski once wrote a book basically shit-talking about the entire world, and he had a pretty good run before the pigs were kicking down his shanty door. The government had the entire FBI looking for him, and even then, it took them almost 20 years to find the guy. And unlike Ted, I won’t be putting pipe bombs in people’s mailboxes, for lack of a marketing budget.
Nowadays, good luck trying to keep the U.S. government’s attention for more than a minute. If Hurricane Katrina taught us anything, it’s that no federal agency has inordinate amounts of time and money to dedicate toward the interests of Black people, even if your name is Jay-Z.
Then again, he does have Obama’s direct phone number …
I’m probably just being overly paranoid, because unlike 99% of rappers at the tail-end of their careers, Jay-Z is a veritable rich person, so what threat would one little self-published book really pose to his giant piles of money? He has that fuck-around type of money, where he can just up and open a sports bar in the Atlanta airport without really having to make a business case for it, aside from thinking to himself, “I was thirsty in the Atlanta airport that one time.”
Part of what I’ve set out to do with this book is take a closer look at Jay’s track record when it comes to business. He often comes across as that guy who does a lot of cocaine and always has these great “business ideas” while high, except Jay actually has the money to start a 24/7 sneaker delivery service if he felt like it. And thus far we, the laypeople, have sat back and found it acceptable, without calling it out for what it is — dumb shit.
Far be it from me to tell Jay-Z how to spend his money, though: I’m living paycheck to paycheck. He’s a bona fide Black celebrity, and if there’s anything to celebrate, it’s the fact that he’s managed to hold onto his money for this long, by way of his own hustling skills or crafty Israeli accountants. That’s not to say all Black people are terrible with handling money, because “das racist,” but the evidence that Black celebrities are shitty at handling money is pretty overwhelming.
One example that comes to mind is the ESPN 30 for 30: Broke documentary, in which ESPN films famous Black athletes struggling to understand how money works. At one point, former NFL wide receiver Andre Rison literally breaks down the magic that is a bank account, describing in detail how you can “pull out money anytime, you can put money in anytime,” with the same child-like wonderment as if he just discovered sliced bread.
Thus, one might think a Black celebrity rapper with even larger revenue streams would be exponentially worse off, but apparently not. At least I thought that, seeing how I came up in practically the same situation as Jay-Z and I’ve yet to be listed on any Forbes list.
But the fact of the matter is, the opportunities made available to Jay-Z simply don’t exist anymore.
Much like Jay-Z, my parents split when I was about 9 years old. My father bounced and I’ve lived with my mom since then. It’s weird when your parents get divorced because you get taken to different doctors and counselors, and they will straight up ask you, “Which parent do you wanna stay with?”
Which is a veiled way of asking, “Which parent do you think will fuck up the least?” Unfortunately, the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn (where Jay-Z grew up) doesn’t keep a counselor on staff to try and keep families together, because single-parent households are their #1 tenants and that would be bad for business.
At that age, I didn’t really have the life experience to know that adults are basically winging it in life, hoping their kids don’t end up in a gang, in prison, or on a single-camera MTV reality show about teenage pregnancy. I liked my mom more and she had better cooking skills, so I stuck with what I knew.
My first visitation with my father was through the Florida Department of Children and Families, or as some other states call it, “Child Protective Services.” I’m not sure what exactly they protect children from — I think it’s to protect kids from starting rap careers — and like all government agencies it’s “go big or go home.”
When you have a visitation day, you have to show up at like 7:00 AM on a Saturday, because the people who run the visitations hate their jobs and hate having to deal with children (again, who are they really protecting?). It’s not like they’re unaware of all the good cartoons that play on TV at 8:00 AM. Their visitation schedules are basically a giant middle finger to kids — and adults wonder why kids think that divorce is their own fault.
The DCF office I went to was in Little Havana, where I lived during my most formative years. When you go inside, there’s a room made of what looks like bulletproof glass, with 2 doors on opposite sides. The idea is that one parents drops the kid off on one side, and the kid has to walk through this bulletproof room to the other side.
I’m assuming the purpose of this is to prevent deadbeat dads from putting a shoe on their baby mommas. But as a kid, I didn’t put two and two together and realize that there must’ve been another reason why they put me inside of bulletproof glass. There must’ve been a direct correlation between visiting a DCF office in a bad neighborhood and getting shot, otherwise why wouldn’t they just use regular plastic, let alone build a regular room?
In retrospect I realize that this is how the DCF, from an early age, crushes any hopes a kid has of getting shot and earning enough street cred to join a gang or start a rap career. If only I’d been shot at like Jay-Z had, I could’ve started my own line of grass-fed vodka by now, for the fuck of it.
I guess I was “lucky” enough to not get shot at the DCF and I eventually fell into my father’s custody for the weekend, which I spent with him and my cousins at my Aunt Nella’s house. This house was located in the slums of Little Havana (also known as “Little Havana”) and was an absolute shithole.
The house was in the kind of neighborhood where bulletproof glass would’ve actually been useful, but the DCF used it all up constructing their anti-rap-career centers, so if a drive-by occurred I might’ve gotten really lucky. The house also had a bit of a roach problem, and the backyard doubled as a ghetto basketball court — the basket wasn’t so much a basket as it was a milk crate nailed to a telephone pole, with the bottom cut out of it.
I wasn’t incredibly tight with my cousins and haven’t heard from them in a decade-plus, but I have to credit them for making me who I am today. My cousin Hector was the first person to put me on to rap music at the ripe old age of 9, parental warning sticker be damned. He essentially forced me to listen to Big Pun’s seminal (pause) album Capital Punishment all the way through, multiple times over.
Based on what I remember about Hector, he probably shoplifted the CD from a record store back when both of those things existed. For readers too young to remember, back in the day you had to actually go to a brick & mortar store to physically steal your music on a disc, instead of stealing it off the Internet in mere seconds. He also had all the Wu-Tang and Mobb Deep albums released up until then, so it was pretty much a weekend-long brainwashing with rap. It’s no wonder I still listen to this shit.
This was circa 1998, when AOL was on the come-up and the Internet had only recently been a twinkle in the Illuminati’s eye. We didn’t have dial-up(!) Internet at my house, but my cousins did, so I was really excited to use it.
Since my father was asleep for most of the visitation, I took it upon myself to become immersed in the magical world of the Internet. Since the Internet was boring as shit in 1998, I spent the majority of my weekend staying up all night in AOL chat rooms, talking shit as well as a 9 year old could.
The three days I spent at the house would prove to be a pivotal time in my Internet career. My biggest discovery that weekend aside from rap was that porn existed, and I would liken it to the moment when man first discovered fire. It was beautiful, but my young impressionable self was confused and afraid.
Suffice it to say that when your first exposure to sex is a grainy video of a woman doing unspeakable things with a strawberry, you become acutely aware that your life has been changed forever.
That weekend was also a full 2 years after Jay-Z’s debut album Reasonable Doubt was released. Even then, my cousin Hector didn’t have a copy. I knew Hector was down as hell when it came to rap, so I have to wonder if he knew something about Jay-Z at the time that I didn’t. He kept an ear to the streets, as DJ Khaled might say between gasps for breath and bites from a cheesesteak (“whiz wit,” for my Philadelphia readers).
Looking back at it, I think I know why Hector didn’t have a copy of Reasonable Doubt. He probably thought Jay-Z wasn’t really hood enough, and I’m inclined to agree.
The only real difference between my upbringing and Jay-Z’s is that in this day and age, there are a lot more barriers to establishing yourself as a bona fide gangster than Jay-Z ever faced. There wasn’t any bulletproof glass in the Marcy Projects protecting Young Hov. He could’ve gotten shot while tying his shoes and recorded a rap about it that same evening.
Compare that to the mid-’90s, when I would’ve had to practically pay someone in Little Havana to let a stray bullet hit me and kickstart my rap career. Lord knows I didn’t have that kind of money to spend anyway, what with all the dial-up fees I racked up from downloading porn at my cousin’s house.
Put another way, Jay-Z had every opportunity in the world to get shot at and have something to rap about as a kid. Despite what flash-in-the-pan rappers like Bobby Shmurda might lead you to believe, a kid in a broken home today couldn’t get a bullet lodged in his shoulder if his life depended on it. And it kinda does, because if he can’t start a rap career or play sports, then he’s going to be stuck in the ghetto forever. That’s how the American Dream was supposed to work, but the new “Time-Out” Generation overdosed on bulletproof glass and portends the downfall of hip-hop.
I’m just saying, maybe we give Jay-Z a bit too much credit for his supposed rags-to-riches story. Maybe Jay-Z was really just a kid who was in the right place in the right time to sell drugs and get shot at, and who desperately needs to be knocked down a couple of pegs as an adult.
The issue is that no one’s willing to do the knocking. I recall reading a Rolling Stone article that claimed Bob Dylan was the godfather of rap, because his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” has some bits of 1960s slang in it and rhymes two lines at a time. Bob Dylan also did a song with Kurtis Blow, an actual godfather of rap, in the 1980s, but Dylan was just a feature on it for the intro. If Dylan were in fact the godfather of rap, wouldn’t other rappers be throwing themselves at him to try and get a guest verse? #StayWoke.
Obviously Rolling Stone is going to espouse the greatness of Bob Dylan — they’re named after a fuckin’ Bob Dylan song. Given the chance, they would run cover stories every week on how grateful they are that Bob Dylan cured ALS / Lou Gherig’s disease with his guitar, if not for the laws that prevent you from printing outright lies or pictures of the Rolling Stone staff performing fellatio on the front of a magazine.
I guess they just had to settle with saying Bob Dylan invented rap. And people wonder why print journalism is dead.
Rolling Stone pretty much jumped the shark in terms of journalistic integrity in the 1970s, right around the time they tried to leave Hunter S. Thompson for dead in Vietnam. They told Thompson the Vietnam War was ending and flew him all the way out to Saigon to write a story about it, and then Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner decided to cancel the story and leave Thompson in Saigon. They didn’t give him so much as a two weeks’ notice or anything, they just never came back to pick him up.
I don’t think society can rely on a publication written by a bunch of Bob Dylan stans who tried to murder Hunter S. Thompson for much of anything, let alone taking rappers like Jay-Z to task whenever they do dumb shit. It’s up to the rest of us — or in this case, just me.
Chapter 1 >>
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.
