3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  Sprint’s eventual investment gave Jay-Z not only a lifeline but a war chest to fund such battles while continuing to expand Tidal’s reach. The infusion probably won’t be the last move for the streaming service. Now connected to Sprint’s forty-five million customers, Tidal has the sort of audience that might make it an appealing buyout target for competitors Spotify and Apple, or even another tech giant like Google or Amazon looking to make a splash in streaming.

  In the meantime, Jay-Z’s connection to the mobile phone industry has come full circle. Though he missed a chance to get in on Boost Mobile at the turn of the new millennium, he finds himself under the same umbrella—Sprint—and worth hundreds of millions more on paper. Now that’s a Jay-Z–style boost.

  CHAPTER 12

  State of the Art

  Somewhere along the two-mile stretch between the Hudson River and Crispy Crust Pizza—the Englewood, New Jersey, slice joint where Sylvia Robinson formed the Sugarhill Gang—sits the home of Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean. The Bronx-born beatmaker, now in his late thirties, continued Charlie Stettler’s unlikely Switzerland–U.S. hip-hop connection by taking his name from the European sneaker brand K-Swiss, and was once dubbed the best hip-hop producer of all time by Kanye West. Over the course of his decades-long career, he’s worked with Diddy, Dre, and particularly Jay-Z; he’s also a crucial conduit linking hip-hop’s graffiti heritage to the world of fine art.

  Swizz has a fittingly immodest home, a several-dozen-room mansion that he and wife Alicia Keys purchased from Eddie Murphy for about $15 million in 2012, after they’d grown weary of paparazzi attention at their SoHo pad. They have decidedly different decorative taste from that of the aforementioned comedian. Though Swizz left Murphy’s basement movie theater intact, complete with its light-bulb-framed posters for Coming to America and The Nutty Professor, he peppered the upstairs with prized pieces from what he calls the Dean Collection, including works by Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, and, of course, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

  Swizz also ripped up Murphy’s basketball court, sunk the floor down a meter or so, and built a gallery big enough to hold, on one wall, a Kehinde Wiley painting the size of the broad side of a shipping container and, right next to it, a forty-foot-tall wooden Mickey Mouse–looking creature crafted by the artist Kaws.

  “One of his biggest sculptures that he’s done,” Swizz muses as we settle into a pair of Eames chairs covered in graffiti. “See how shiny it is?”1

  “Do you have to wax it?” I inquire.

  “You gotta keep it greased up.”

  “How often?”

  “Every couple of months.”

  “I guess it would get dusty.”

  “Yeah,” he sighs. “This is a project in itself.”

  Giant wooden mice aside, Swizz’s main focus these days is his gig as Bacardí’s global creative director, a remarkable career move that grew out of his No Commission art fair, which allows artists to keep all the cash generated from the sale of their work instead of having to fork over half of the total to a gallery. The beverage giant came on as a sponsor for the first iteration, held at Miami’s Art Basel in 2015, and agreed to Swizz’s conditions.

  “This is not a logo contest,” Swizz explained to the company’s brass. “This is something where the artist should be free, and they should have their work breathe and live on its own without somebody trying to stamp their logo on it just because they’re partnering with the event.”

  Bacardí’s executives were knocked out by that sort of approach to marketing, and within a few months they signed him to an incentive-laden, multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal to join the company—which does $5 billion in annual revenue—as an executive. Two months in, Bacardí chief Mike Dolan was even more impressed by Swizz than he thought he’d be.

  “You’re not going to get many celebrities who will go to meetings from eight in the morning through dinner and listen to endless presentations,” he told me. “I want the creativity that he can bring to this, and across the various brands that we’ve got, and [for him to] help us think out of the box.”2

  It’s amazing to think that, just a decade after Cristal famously dismissed rappers as unwanted customers, one of the world’s biggest beverage companies decided to place a beatmaker from the Bronx in charge of a two-hundred-brand portfolio that includes Grey Goose vodka, Dewar’s Scotch, and Bacardí rum. But hip-hop keeps reinventing itself. When getting paid to appear in a commercial wasn’t enough, 50 Cent took equity in Vitaminwater’s parent company. Then Diddy reached new financial heights by earning the trust of Diageo and hawking Cîroc through new media and old. Today, Swizz marks the latest step in the evolution, quietly and discreetly pulling strings from the executive suite.

  “They are aware me and Puff are friends,” says Swizz of his Bacardí bosses. “I’m not downplaying any of that. I am going to go hard. I am going to be competitive. [But] we do two different things.”3

  Swizz may boast one of hip-hop’s finest art collections, but perhaps the strangest development in the connection between the two worlds came from the Wu-Tang Clan. In late 2013, I first learned about this link through a missive sent from a suspicious-looking email address touting a project too strange to be fiction.

  The sender, a Morocco-based producer named Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh, said that he had spent the past six years collaborating with the Wu-Tang Clan to create a secret album. The recording process was so clandestine that the Wu-Tang members didn’t even have access to the full digital drafts of the songs to which they had contributed; they laid down their vocals over bare-bones beats and sent them to Cilvaringz for completion. He told me the album sat in a vault in Marrakech—where it would remain until the group sold the lone existing copy to a single buyer.4

  I followed up with Cilvaringz and asked him to put me in touch with Wu-Tang ringleader Robert “RZA” Diggs to verify that this was, in fact, a real project with the group’s buy-in. “The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years,” RZA explained, speaking of his inspiration for Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. “And yet [music] doesn’t receive the same treatment as [fine] art… especially nowadays, when it’s been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.”5

  His argument centered on the notion that the culprit wasn’t just music piracy. Streaming services, traditional albums, and terrestrial radio play all had something to do with the perceived devaluation. In the view of RZA and Cilvaringz, music had been falling from its perch among the fine arts for centuries. Long ago, Leonardo was supported by the wealthy Medici family in Renaissance Italy as he crafted classic works of visual art, just as European royalty hired Mozart, and the archduke of Austria underwrote Beethoven’s work. Today, though, the prices paid for the most expensive paintings are often orders of magnitude larger than the biggest record advances. Wu-Tang hoped that a one-of-a-kind album might just begin to change that paradigm, or at least call attention to it, and make the group some extra cash along the way.

  After I broke the news in March 2014, the story quickly snowballed. First came music publications like Billboard and Rolling Stone, and then mainstream outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times. Eventually, papers from as far away as New Zealand weighed in. The reaction veered from skepticism (Is this an elaborate publicity stunt?) to admiration (It’s about time for music to be valued properly!) to shock (Rappers care about fine art?) to fan outrage (Wu-Tang is being greedy by not letting the world hear its work!). A few weeks later, Cilvaringz offered to play me part of the secret album if I visited him in Marrakech. Forbes leapt at the opportunity to send me to be the first civilian to listen to the record.6

  Once I arrived in Morocco, Cilvaringz took me to see the lone copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, housed in a safe in a suite at the Royal Mansour, a hotel popular with monarchs and billionaires. The physical album, a simple CD, was ensconced in a one-of-a-kind silver-and-nickel box hand-engraved by British-Moroccan artist Yahya, who
m I met as well. (“It’s either genius or madness,” he told me of the endeavor.7) The music Cilvaringz played me lived up to the promise of its grandiose casing: urgent, hard-edged hip-hop punctuated by the soundtrack of life in New York—some rather startling fire engine horns, for example—and the trenchant sort of rhymes that have been displaced by meandering triplets in recent rap.

  “It’s a conceptual record where you’re trying to go back to ninety-three [to] ninety-seven, that glorious time,” Cilvaringz told me. “You’re trying to get [Wu-Tang] into an aggressive mode, and the beats are aggressive.”8

  In early 2015, Wu-Tang tapped upstart auction house Paddle8, which had previously peddled the work of artists including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, to sell the album. Despite the crush of interest in Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, no buyer immediately emerged. Part of the problem may have been the restrictions placed on reproduction. A record label might well have purchased the album for $5 million or so—an amount that a premier act might receive for an advance—with the goal of releasing it for mass consumption. But Wu-Tang’s insistence that the record remain hidden made the economics tricky. Though there were discussions of playing the album for fans at a series of tightly secured museum exhibits, the group eventually insisted that any potential buyer agree to not release the record publicly for at least eighty-eight years.9

  Many months later, Wu-Tang found a buyer: baby-faced pharma bad boy Martin Shkreli, who agreed to pay $2 million for the record. After the deal was announced, though, the group started to feel some blowback over its choice of buyer. The centimillionaire Shkreli had earned the ire of a vast swath of people—including both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, remarkably—for jacking up the price of a drug often used to treat infections in AIDS patients by several thousand times. (Earlier in 2015, the BBC had dubbed Shkreli “the most hated man in America.”)

  RZA publicly reacted to the feedback by claiming that the deal had been agreed upon in May, before the extent of Shkreli’s unpopular dealings came to light, and pledged to donate a large chunk of the proceeds to charity. The album’s buyer didn’t take kindly to the response. “I fucking make money,” he told the site HipHopDX. “What do you think I do, make cookies? No, motherfucker. I sell drugs.”10

  Hip-hop had come full circle. Many of its most celebrated practitioners—including members of Wu-Tang—had not only sold drugs at one point or another but openly and repeatedly bragged about it in verse. Now RZA was trashing the buyer of the group’s latest record for doing the same. No matter: at the end of the day, Wu-Tang had at least partially achieved its goal of putting music back into the fine arts conversation.

  “I’m staring at a Picasso in my living room right now that’s no different from the Wu-Tang box except it’s about twenty times more expensive,” said Shkreli at the end of 2015, before ending up in jail for fraud charges. “It is what it is.”

  Diddy, meanwhile, continued to find new ways to place hip-hop in the living rooms of additional scores of American families, bringing his Revolt network to fifty million people between cable, Web, and mobile.

  “I saw a wide-open lane to kind of create the CNN of music, the ESPN of music, to follow our artists that we love in such a journalistic and passionate way that ESPN follows Kobe or LeBron or Serena,” Diddy told me in 2014. “That’s the same way that we’ll follow anybody from Chance the Rapper to Jay-Z to me.”11

  Revolt has a long way to go before it reaches the status of the aforementioned networks, but it has still helped boost Diddy’s fortune, which ballooned from $475 million in 2011 to $820 million in 2017. Perhaps more interesting is the culture at Revolt, particularly in the context of Diddy’s earlier entrepreneurial ventures. In the 1990s, Diddy would berate superiors on a regular basis; in the 2000s, he sent underlings on arduous cheesecake expeditions. Yet on a 2014 reporting trip to Revolt’s headquarters, I found his new employees painting a different picture.

  “When I worked at the other office, it was so different, because it was just everybody working toward what Mr. Diddy wanted,” explained Tiesha LeShore, who started out as an assistant for the mogul years ago before taking a role with Revolt. “[Now] he seems to be more interested in supporting what everyone is doing. He sees the value and he makes sure your supervisors know that you are valuable. It’s amazing to see that difference.”12

  Added Diddy, in a separate conversation: “I don’t think I was having enough dialogue with the people who believed in my dream enough to come and work with me. So I was like, ‘I want to become a better boss, I want to become a better leader.’… You should treat people how you would treat yourself.”13

  Dr. Dre has been undergoing similar revelations of late. He and his Beats cofounder teamed up to donate $70 million to the University of Southern California in 2013, creating the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation. The four-year undergrad program brought students a curriculum packed with one-on-one mentoring from professors and entertainment industry legends alike, welcoming its first class of twenty-five students in 2014.14

  It seemed to be a penance of sorts, at least for Dre. “I made some fucking horrible mistakes in my life,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015, shortly before N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton made its debut.15 At around the same time, Dre released his long-awaited third studio album, Compton. It won praise from critics (the often harsh Pitchfork called it “charged up, nimble, and relevant”16) but earned only gold certification, the first time one of Dre’s solo albums didn’t go multiplatinum.

  It didn’t really matter, though. The film—coproduced by Dre, Ice Cube, and a handful of others—went on to gross north of $160 million domestically, on par with mainstream blockbusters of that year like Fifty Shades of Grey and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. Rolling Stone called Straight Outta Compton “an electrifying piece of hip-hop history that speaks urgently to right now.”17 Photographer Jonathan Mannion remembers seeing Dre speak at the premiere. “He was just like, ‘Yo, yo, thank you all for fucking being here, man,’” says Mannion. “There were f-bombs… He hasn’t changed and become something that he isn’t.”18

  Back on the East Coast, in a fitting bit of poetic justice, Robert Moses’s beloved Shea Stadium fell to the wrecking ball in 2009, just one year before Jay-Z helped break ground on the Barclays Center. In 2013, Jay-Z ditched his Nets stake in order to launch Roc Nation Sports—and became a professional agent representing NFL stars from Dez Bryant to Ndamukong Suh and NBA players like Kevin Durant, who signed a two-year, $54 million deal with the Golden State Warriors in 2016. Jay-Z and his firm capture 3 to 5 percent of such deals.

  In baseball, the agent’s cut tends to be toward the higher end of that spectrum, as Jay-Z and his team knew when signing up MLB stars Yoenis Céspedes and Robinson Canó. The rapper snagged the latter away from Scott Boras, and then lured the superagent into a war of words by taunting him with a rap lyric: “Scott Boras, you over, baby / Robinson Canó, you coming with me.” (The line was delivered in “Crown,” on Jay-Z’s 2013 album, Magna Carta… Holy Grail, which went platinum before it even came out: he had convinced Samsung to pay him $5 million for one million copies to give to its customers.) Boras made the mistake of clapping back. “If Steven Spielberg walked into USC Medical Center,” he blustered, “and said, ‘I want to do neurosurgery,’ they don’t give him a scalpel.” Boras had fallen into Jay-Z’s trap, elevating the rapper to his own level by calling attention to him; soon ESPN had dubbed the Boras–Jay-Z dynamic “baseball’s fascinating new rivalry.”19

  Nobody thought Canó wanted to leave the Yankees, or that the wealthy Bronx Bombers would let their best player walk. After the 2013 season, the team reportedly offered the slugger $170 million over seven years; he declined, and despite industry-wide doubts that he could get a better deal, Jay-Z’s firm eventually landed him a ten-year, $240 million pact with the Seattle Mariners. (Though the average annual value of the Yankees’ offer was slightly higher, the salary
Canó got for his age thirty-eight to forty seasons—beyond the end of a typical baseball player’s career—made the Mariners’ deal far better for him.)20

  It wasn’t even clear if the deal had been negotiated by Jay-Z himself or by his partners at CAA’s sports division. But he proved that he had no problem helping hometown players leave the Big Apple for bigger bucks. Perhaps because of this, he managed to extract a four-year, $110 million deal for New York Mets outfielder Yoenis Céspedes to stay with the team after the 2016 season. And more athletes keep signing up, flattered by the attention from Jay-Z. “It’s a family. You gotta feel special when they’re asking you to join them,” said NBA player Willie Cauley-Stein. “It’s so exclusive.”21

  Meanwhile, Jay-Z has continued to sign recording artists to his Roc Nation management division, which now includes Rihanna, Big Sean, Grimes, J. Cole, Korn, Santigold, and Shakira. The corporate reception has been quite positive. Though Live Nation is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, it doesn’t break out Roc Nation’s performance in its reports. But Iconix, another publicly traded company, did leave a fascinating financial Easter egg in its 2014 year-end rundown: the company, which had acquired Rocawear nearly a decade earlier, paid $32 million for a minority interest in Jay-Z’s Marcy Media LLC—the holding company containing his half of Roc Nation—to effectively pick up a 5 percent piece of Roc Nation.22 The deal placed a theoretical value of $640 million on Jay-Z’s company, though that number may include other assets contained beneath the opaque Marcy Media umbrella. At any rate, the move gave Jay-Z a big cash infusion that he likely plowed right into his Tidal acquisition, which happened at around the same time.