by Jay-Z
Those battles were big for all of us in hip-hop and offered an important survival lesson: Politicians—at the highest levels—would try to silence and kill our culture if they could hustle some votes out of it. Even black leaders who were supposed to be representing you would turn on you—would pile your records up and run over them with a fucking bulldozer or try to ban you from radio—if they felt threatened by your story or language. But the thing is, we kept winning.
The push for censorship only reinforced what most of us already suspected: America doesn’t want to hear about it. There was a real tension between the power of the story we wanted to tell and just how desperately some powerful people didn’t want to hear it. But the story had to come out sooner or later because it was so dramatic, important, crazy—and just plain compelling.
Back in the eighties and early nineties cities in this country were literally battlegrounds. Kids were as well armed as a paramilitary outfit in a small country. Teenagers had Uzis, German Glocks, and assault rifles—and we had the accessories, too, like scopes and silencers. Guns were easier to get in the hood than public assistance. There were times when the violence just seemed like background music, like we’d all gone numb.
The deeper causes of the crack explosion were in policies concocted by a government that was hostile to us, almost genocidally hostile when you think about how they aided or tolerated the unleashing of guns and drugs on poor communities, while at the same time cutting back on schools, housing, and assistance programs. And to top it all off, they threw in the so-called war on drugs, which was really a war on us. There were racist new laws put on the books, like the drug laws that penalized the possession of crack cocaine with more severe sentences than the possession of powder. Three-strike laws could put young guys in jail for twenty-five years for nonviolent crimes. The disease of addiction was treated as a crime. The rate of incarceration went through the roof. Police abuses and corruption were rampant. Across the country, cops were involved in the drug trade, playing both sides. Young black men in New York in the eighties and nineties were gunned down by cops for the lightest suspected offenses, or died in custody under suspicious circumstances. And meanwhile we were killing ourselves by the thousands.
Almost twenty years after the fact, there are studies that say between 1989 and 1994 more black men were murdered in the streets of America than died in the entire Vietnam War. America did not want to talk about the human damage, or the deeper causes of the carnage. But then here came rap, like the American nightmare come to life. The disturbing shit you thought you locked away for good, buried at the bottom of the ocean, suddenly materialized in your kid’s bedroom, laughing it off, cursing loud, and grabbing its nuts, refusing to be ignored anymore. I’m America’s worst nightmare / I’m young black and holding my nuts like shh-yeah. Hardcore rap wasn’t political in an explicit way, but its volume and urgency kept a story alive that a lot of people would have preferred to disappear. Our story. It scared a lot of people.
WE TOTE GUNS TO THE GRAMMYS
Invisibility was the enemy, and the fight had multiple fronts. For instance, 1998 was an important year for hip-hop. It was two years after Pac had been gunned down, and just a year after Biggie was killed. DMX dropped two number one albums that year. Outkast released Aquemini, a game-changing album lyrically and sonically, but also for what it meant to Southern rap. (Juvenile’s 400 Degreez, also released in ’98, was a major shot in the growing New Orleans movement. I jumped on a remix of his single “Ha,” which was a great mix of regional styles.) Mos Def and Talib Kweli had their Black Star album, one of the definitive indie rap records of all time. The prototypical “backpack rappers,” A Tribe Called Quest, released their last album, The Love Movement. And the biggest album of the year in any genre was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
It was a beautiful time all the way around in hip-hop. The album I released that year, Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life, was the biggest record of my life. The opening week was unreal for me—we did more than three hundred thousand units, by far the biggest opening number of my career to that point. The album moved Lauryn Hill down to number four, but Outkast’s Aquemini was right behind me, and The Love Movement was number three. Those four albums together told the story of young black America from four dramatically different perspectives—we were bohemians and hustlers and revolutionaries and space-age Southern boys. We were funny and serious, spiritual and ambitous, lovers and gangsters, mothers and brothers. This was the full picture of our generation. Each of these albums was an innovative and honest work of art and wildly popular on the charts. Every kid in the country had at least one of these albums, and a lot of them had all four. The entire world was plugged into the stories that came out of the specific struggles and creative explosion of our generation. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of what was happening in hip-hop that year.
So, in this incredible year for diverse strands of real hip-hop, what happens at the Grammy Awards? First, DMX, with two number one albums and a huge single, “Get at Me Dog,” that brought rap back to its grimy roots, was completely snubbed. And then, in this year when rap dominated the charts and provided the most innovative and creative music you could find on the radio, they decided not to televise any of the rap awards. Rap music was fully coming into its own creatively and commercially, but still being treated as if it wasn’t fit to sit in the company of the rest of the music community.
I was nominated three times that year, but when they told us they weren’t televising our awards I decided to stay home. It wasn’t a big-deal, formal boycott. God knows there were bigger issues in the world. And eventually I started coming to the show and even performing. But not until they started showing rap the respect it deserves. The larger point was, I wasn’t going to be a partner to my own invisibility.
CROOKED OFFICER, WHY YOU WANNA SEE ME IN A COFFIN, SIR?
When the politicians can’t censor you and the industry can’t marginalize you, call the cops. The statistics on the incarceration of black men, particularly of men of my generation, are probably the most objective indication that young black men are seen in this country as a “problem” that can be made to literally disappear. No one in the entire world—not in Russia or China or Iran—is locked up like black men are locked up in this country.
I had to deal with the cops when I was hustling, and that made sense. I had to deal with the cops before that, too, because even before I started running the streets, I was on their radar just because of who I was. But when I was done with the streets, and done with my one major brush with law enforcement after I left the streets, I still wasn’t done with five-oh.
One night I was at Bassline with my man Tone from Trackmasters, working on the song that would become “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” on the Blueprint album. I left the studio to run by Club Exit in midtown because I had promised Ja Rule that I’d come by and join him for our big hit “Can I Get A …” I went to the club, performed the song, and ten minutes later I left. I hopped in my Suburban with Ty-Ty and my bodyguard and the driver pulls off. We were one block away from the club when an unmarked police van cut us off, like in a movie. Since there’s a limo partition in the SUV, it took me a few minutes to see what was happening, but it sounded like a raid—sirens flashing, cops yelling. When I lifted the partition I saw half a dozen squad cars surrounding us. My bodyguard was already out of the car and a detective was showcasing his gun up in the air like he had found something. But my bodyguard claimed the gun and showed them his license. I was in the backseat laughing because they were so overdoing it, but the next thing I knew someone was opening my door and putting their hands on me, trying to drag me out of the car and make me turn around. I tried to talk to them. “You know this isn’t necessary; he has a license, he claimed the weapon. What’s the problem?” The cop looked back at me with that shut up, nigger screwface, but I could tell he was confused. This wasn’t going as planned. He asked his partner what he should do. Right in front of me his partner made a call and explained
the situation to whoever was on the other end. “I got Jay-Z,” he said into the phone, with a sense of accomplishment. Then he told his man to arrest me. I was dumbstruck as they loaded me into the back of the cruiser like a prize catch.
When they got me to the precinct for questioning, I saw a giant Peg-Board, the sort you’ve seen before in police television shows and movies. On the Peg-Board were organizational charts of rappers, like you’d have for a major crime organization, like the mafia. But for rappers. Once they had me, they made me do the perp walk, the police-escorted stroll in public, which meant dragging me in front of all the photographers outside the precinct. The charges were dropped, of course—it clearly wasn’t my weapon. But they made sure to humiliate me first. With my other case still pending, this would help paint the picture of me as a menace to society.
If I were just a fan or a casual observer of hip-hop and you told me the NYPD had created a squad or division to deal with rappers, I’d laugh in your face. But it’s clear now that the hip-hop police existed—there have been some media investigations and even a public admission by one prominent detective, the so-called hip-hop cop. Dossiers were created on rappers and their associates, cops staked out shows and nightclubs and followed rappers in broad daylight. The hip-hop cop stayed outside the clubs I was in. Every time I walked into a club he’d joke with me. You got a gun? I would fuck with him right back: Do you? For seven years that cop was there, at every club, every show.
But I still have to ask myself why. Rappers, as a class, are not engaged in anything criminal. They’re musicians. Some rappers and friends of rappers commit crimes. Some bus drivers commit crimes. Some accountants commit crimes. But there aren’t task forces devoted to bus drivers or accountants. Bus drivers don’t have to work under the preemptive suspicion of law enforcement. The difference is obvious, of course: Rappers are young black men telling stories that the police, among others, don’t want to hear. Rappers tend to come from places where police are accustomed to treating everybody like a suspect. The general style of rappers is offensive to a lot of people. But being offensive is not a crime, at least not one that’s on the books. The fact that law enforcement treats rap like organized crime tells you a lot about just how deeply rap offends some people—they’d love for rap itself to be a crime, but until they get that law passed, they come after us however they can.
Sometimes it’s surprising to find out who’s trying to put the invisibility cloak on you. It’s one thing when it comes from the government or from the people in the larger music industry who are trying to keep niggas in their place. But it’s harder to take coming from other artists.
In 2008 I was invited to play at the Glastonbury Festival in England. I took the gig because it was a chance to knock some doors down for the culture. It’s a huge festival, one of the largest outdoor festivals in the world. It started in the seventies and mostly featured rock music, even though the definition of rock music wasn’t always clear—what do Massive Attack, Radiohead, the Arctic Monkeys, Björk, and the Pet Shop Boys really have in common? Well, here’s one thing: None of them rap. When it was announced that I’d be headlining Glastonbury, Noel Gallagher of Oasis said, “I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It’s wrong.” That quote that went around—“I’m not having hip-hop”—said a lot, like he had a veto. But kids today have a mix of songs from all over the place in their iPods, and they take pride in it. There is no rock music with walls around it. It’s one of the great shifts that’s happened over my lifetime, that popular culture has managed to shake free of the constraints that still limit us in so many other parts of life. It’s an open field.
As planned, I played that show in front of 180,000 people. I stood backstage with my crew and we looked out at the crowd. It wasn’t like any other crowd I’d played. There were tens of thousands of people staring up at the stage but it might as well have been a million—bodies covered my entire field of vision. We were under a dark, open sky. Their cheers and chants were like a tidal wave of sound crashing over the stage. It was awesome and a little ominous.
Before I came out, we played a video intro reel about the controversy that included Gallagher’s quote that I had “fucking no chance” of pulling off Glastonbury. Then I walked out on stage with an electric guitar hanging around my neck and started singing Oasis’s biggest hit, “Wonderwall.” It went over big. Then I tore through my set, with my band, a band, by the way, that’s as “Rock” as any band in the world. The show was amazing, one of the highlights of my career. It was one of those moments that taught me that there really is no limit to what hip-hop could do, no place that was closed to its power.
My purposefully fucked-up version of “Wonderwall” put it back on the charts a decade after it came out, ironically.
The whole sequence felt familiar to me—that same sense of someone putting their hands and weight on me, trying to push me back to the margins. Telling me to be quiet, not to get into the frame of their pristine picture. It’s the story of my life and the story of hip-hop. But the beautiful thing at Glastonbury was that when I opened with “Wonderwall,” over a hundred thousand voices rose up into that dark sky to join mine. It was a joke, but it was also kind of beautiful. And then when I segued into “99 Problems,” a hundred thousand voices rocked the chorus with me. To the crowd, it wasn’t rock and rap or a battle of genres—it was music.
LIKE IT’S ’92 AGAIN AND I GOT O’S IN THE RENTALS
Little controversies like Glastonbury felt like the death spasms of an old way of thinking. Even in the world outside of music, things really were changing. For instance, there was Bill Clinton. In 1992, when he was running for president, Clinton made a point of publicly denouncing Sister Souljah at a Rainbow Coalition event—he compared her to David Duke, the white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK—because of some comments she made after the L.A. riots. At the time, everyone knew he was trying to prove to white America that he could stand up to black people, particularly young black people involved in hip-hop, and especially in the aftermath of the L.A. riots. He knew that demonizing young black people, their politics, and their art was always a winning move in American politics.
In 1992 I was, well, I won’t get into details, but I was probably somewhere in the Middle Atlantic region of the United States, doing things that Bill Clinton probably wouldn’t have approved of. I wasn’t registered to vote back then, and even if I was, I don’t know that I would’ve bothered to vote for Bill. Clinton was known as being comfortable with black folks; he played the sax on Arsenio Hall’s show and some people even talked about him as the “first black President.” He wasn’t, of course. Even if he liked black people, whatever that means, back in ’92 he saw people like me as a punching bag he could use to get votes from people nothing like me, people who hated me. In other words, he didn’t see people like me at all. I can’t say I saw him, either.
By 2008, I actually knew Bill Clinton. I first really sat down with him at the Spotted Pig. Bono brought him in one night and we hung out for a long time in the back room of the restaurant, joking and talking about music. It was so strange for me, sitting across the table from Bill Clinton, swapping stories. It made the distance between 1992 and 2008 seem deeper than just the passage of time. The world had changed around us, like it had been hit by some kind of cultural earthquake that rearranged everything. Like we’d all been launched into the air in 1992, me from the block, him from the White House, and somehow we landed next to each other in the back room of the Spotted Pig on a banquette with Bono.
I like Bill Clinton. He has a quick laugh and genuine curiosity and a big appetite for life. That night at the Spotted Pig he went to the kitchen and posed for photos with the busboys and waiters and signed every autograph he could before he left. He was clearly big-hearted. He’d done a lot of good as president. But he’d also taken the country to war in the Balkans and sat in his office while AIDS ravaged Africa and genocide broke out in Rwanda. And one day in 1992 he looked out at an audience of b
lack people and told them that Sister Souljah was as bad as the Klan.
But I’m not exactly the same person I was in 1992, either. Everyone needs a chance to evolve.
YOU GOT IT, FUCK BUSH
Another Clinton was running for president in 2008, but, as much as I’d come to like the Clintons, I wasn’t supporting Hillary. Wasn’t even considering it. I’d done some campaign events in 2004 when Kerry was running for president, but in 2008, for the first time in my life, I was committed to a candidate for president in a big way.
A close friend of Barack Obama is a big fan of my music and reached out to someone in my camp to set up a meeting. This was still pretty early in the process, before the primaries had gotten started, and I hadn’t really engaged with the whole thing yet or given any money to anyone or anything. All I knew was that I was sick about what had happened with this country since 9/11, the wars and torture, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the arrogance and dishonesty of the Bush administration. I sat down with Barack at a one-on-one meeting set up by that mutual friend and we talked for hours. People always ask me what we talked about, and I wish I could remember some specific moment when it hit me that this guy was special. But it wasn’t like that. It was the fact that he sought me out and then asked question after question, about music, about where I’m from, about what people in my circle—not the circle of wealthy entertainers, but the wider circle that reaches out to my fans and all the way back to Marcy—were thinking and concerned about politically. He listened. It was extraordinary.