Photo: Joella Marano from Manhattan, NY / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
Full name : Shawn Corey Carter
Other Names:
- The Carter Administration
- Jigga
- Hova
- El Presidente
Nationality: American
Born: December 4, 1969
Age: 50 years
Born Place: Brooklyn, New York, United States
Gender: Male
Occupation:
- Rapper
- songwriter
- record executive
- entrepreneur
- investor
- businessman
- record producer
Spouse: Beyoncé (m. 2008)
Net Worth: US$1 billion (2019)
BIOGRAPHY
Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), better known by his stage name Jay-Z (stylized as JAY-Z), is an American rapper, songwriter, record executive, entrepreneur, businessman, and record producer.
Born and raised in New York City, Jay-Z first began his musical career after founding the record label Roc-A-Fella Records in 1995, and subsequently released his debut studio album Reasonable Doubt in 1996. The album was released to widespread critical success, and solidified his standing in the music industry. He has gone on to release twelve additional albums, including the acclaimed albums, The Blueprint (2001), The Black Album (2003), American Gangster (2007), and 4:44 (2017). Jay-Z has also released the full-length collaborative albums Watch the Throne (2011) and Everything Is Love (2018) with Kanye West and wife Beyoncé, respectively.
Outside of his musical career, Jay-Z has also attained significant success and media attention for his career as a businessman. In 1999, he founded the clothing retailer Rocawear, and in 2003, he founded the luxury sports bar chain 40/40 Club. Both businesses have grown to become multi-million-dollar corporations, and allowed Jay-Z to fund the start-up for the entertainment company Roc Nation, which was founded in 2008. In 2015, he acquired the tech company Aspiro and took charge of their media streaming service Tidal.
Jay-Z is one of the world’s best-selling music artists, with over 50 million albums and 75 million singles sold worldwide. He has won a total of 22 Grammy Awards, the most by a rapper, and holds the record for the most number-one albums by a solo artist on the Billboard 200, with 14. He has been ranked by Billboard and fellow music publication Rolling Stone as one of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In 2017, he became the first rapper to be honored into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and in 2018, received the commemorative “Salute to Industry Icons” award at the 60th Grammy Awards. In June 2019, Jay-Z officially became the first hip hop billionaire, making him the fifth-wealthiest African American and the wealthiest American musician.
EARLY LIFE
Shawn Corey Carter was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on December 4, 1969. He was raised in Marcy Houses, a housing project in Brooklyn’s Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood. After their father, Adnis Reeves, abandoned the family, Jay-Z and his three siblings were raised by their mother, Gloria Carter. Reeves would later meet and reconcile with Jay-Z before dying in 2003. Jay-Z claims in his lyrics that in 1982, at age 12, he shot his older brother in the shoulder for stealing his jewelry. Along with rapper AZ, he attended Eli Whitney High School in Brooklyn until it was closed. He then attended nearby George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School with rappers The Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes, followed by a stint at Trenton Central High School in Trenton, New Jersey, though he did not graduate. According to his interviews and lyrics, he sold crack cocaine and was shot at three times during this period.
According to his mother, Jay-Z used to wake up his siblings at night banging out drum patterns on the kitchen table. She bought him a boombox for his birthday, sparking his interest in music, and he began freestyling and writing lyrics. Known as “Jazzy” around the neighborhood, he later adopted the stage name “Jay-Z” in homage to his mentor Jaz-O. Jay-Z can be briefly heard on several of Jaz-O’s early recordings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including “HP Gets Busy”, “The Originators” and “Hawaiian Sophie”. Jay-Z became embroiled in several battles with rapper LL Cool J in the early 1990s. He first became known to a wide audience on the posse cut “Show and Prove” on the 1994 Big Daddy Kane album Daddy’s Home. Jay-Z has been referred to as Big Daddy Kane’s hype man during this period, although Kane explains that he didn’t fill the traditional hype man role, and was instead basically making cameo appearances on stage. “When I would leave the stage to go change outfits, I would bring out Jay-Z and Positive K and let them freestyle until I came back to the stage.” The young Jay-Z appeared on a popular song by Big L, “Da Graveyard”, and on Mic Geronimo’s “Time to Build”, which also featured early appearances by DMX and Ja Rule in 1995. His first official rap single was called “In My Lifetime”, for which he released a music video in 1995. An unreleased music video was also produced for the B-side “I Can’t Get with That.”
MUSICAL STYLE
Influences
Jay-Z says his earliest exposure to music was through his parents’ record collection, which was mostly of soul artists such as Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway. He says “I grew up around music, listening to all types of people… I’m into music that has soul in it, whether it be rap, R&B, pop music, whatever. As long as I can feel their soul through the wax, that’s what I really listen to.” He often uses excerpts from these artists as samples in his work, particularly in the Kanye West productions included on The Blueprint.
Rapping technique
Royce da 5’9″ and Fredro Starr of Onyx both describe Jay-Z’s emphasis on flow in the book How to Rap—Starr says that Jay-Z is “a master of the flow—he can flow fast, he can flow slow”. The book describes how Jay-Z uses ‘rests’ to provide structure to a verse and how he uses ‘partial linking’ to add more rhymes to a verse. Jay-Z’s early style is described by Vibe as “a distinctly Das EFX-type, stiggety style” on his 12″ single “Can’t Get With That”, referring to the fast rhythms and vocal delivery of the group Das EFX. He is also known to write lyrics in his head, as described by Pusha T of Clipse in How to Rap, a style popular with many MCs such as The Notorious B.I.G., Everlast, Bobby Creekwater and Guerilla Black. Shock G of Digital Underground describes Jay-Z’s performance style, saying he “rarely breaks a sweat, and instead uses smoothness and clever wordplay to keep the audience interested and entertained”. Jay-Z’s fast rapping technique, also known as the “triplet rhyme”, was developed during his early years of creating music with former mentor Jaz-O.
PERSONAL LIFE
In 2002, Jay-Z and singer Beyoncé collaborated on the song “’03 Bonnie & Clyde”. He also appeared on Beyoncé’s hit single “Crazy in Love” as well as “That’s How You Like It” from her debut album Dangerously in Love. On her second album, B’Day, he made appearances on the hits “Déjà Vu” and “Upgrade U”. In the video for the latter song, she comically imitates his appearance. They kept a low profile while dating and were married on April 4, 2008. Their relationship became a matter of public record on April 22, 2008, but Beyoncé did not publicly debut her $5 million Lorraine Schwartz-designed wedding ring until the Fashion Rocks concert on September 5, 2008. They reside in an $88 million home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. They generally avoid discussing their relationship, and Beyoncé has stated her belief that this has helped them, while Jay-Z agreed in a People article that they do not “play with [their] relationship”.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z were listed as the most powerful couple for Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2006. In January 2009, Forbes ranked them as Hollywood’s top-earning couple, with a combined total of $162 million. They made it to the top of the list the following year, with a combined total of $122 million between June 2008 and June 2009.
At the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé revealed that she was pregnant with their first child. Their daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, was born at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital on January 7, 2012. Jay-Z released “Glory”, a song dedicated to their child, through his website on January 9, 2012. The song detailed the couple’s pregnancy struggles, including a miscarriage Beyoncé had suffered. Because Blue’s cries were included at the end of the song and she was officially credited on the song as “B.I.C”, she became the youngest person ever (at two days old) to appear on a Billboard chart when “Glory” debuted at No. 74 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. On June 18, 2017, Beyoncé’s father Mathew Knowles confirmed that she and Jay-Z had welcomed twins: a daughter named Rumi and a son named Sir.
DISCOGRAPHY
STUDIO ALBUMS
- Reasonable Doubt (1996)
- In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 (1997)
- Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life (1998)
- Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter (1999)
- The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (2000)
- The Blueprint (2001)
- The Blueprint2: The Gift & the Curse (2002)
- The Black Album (2003)
- Kingdom Come (2006)
- American Gangster (2007)
- The Blueprint 3 (2009)
- Magna Carta Holy Grail (2013)
- 4:44 (2017)
FILMOGRAPHY
- Streets Is Watching (1998)
- Backstage (2000)
- State Property (2002)
- Paper Soldiers (2002)
- Fade to Black (2004)
- The Great Gatsby (2013, executive producer)
- Made in America (2013, documentary)
- Annie (2014, producer)
- Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story (2018, executive producer)
The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 4 July 2020. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
