Empire State of Mind

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  “It was just a real synergistic way of taking the things he does, how he lives, making it really big, and still ‘keeping it real’ in the almost cliché urban sense,” says Fab. “It was a point where his business acumen was beginning to move to this other level because that whole summer, I didn’t see Damon Dash around at all. So it was kind of obvious that something might be happening between them.”

  Putting together a team of NBA all-stars, renting a tour bus, and hiring Fab to film the whole enterprise was a calculated risk. A tournament victory would bring Jay-Z further street cred, more marketing clout with the consumers to whom he was marketing his shoes, and a victorious feature-length documentary from Fab. Team S. Carter clinched a championship showdown with Fat Joe’s Terror Squad by early August. With a roster that included Crawford, McGrady, and James, victory seemed all but guaranteed.

  Brathwaite noticed Jay-Z’s penchant for shrewd risk-reward analysis even when the rapper was relaxing. He and a few of the athletes sometimes passed the time on the bus by playing a poker cousin called Guts, which is characterized by frequent showdowns and fast-multiplying pots. “I don’t play poker, but Guts is a game that Jay talked about a lot on the bus,” says Fab. “I think there’s a connection between that and business. It’s all a gamble. And I guess the thing that makes one gambler better than the next is those that understand when they have a better chance to win.”

  Around this time, Fab’s monologue is interrupted by the trill of his iPhone. He thumbs the screen and draws it to his ear.

  “Yo,” he says. “Listen, I’m doing a little interview right now. I’ma hit you when I finish with my man, all right?”

  He puts the phone down. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s still planning to tell me whatever it was that caused his apparent anxiety earlier.

  “Want some fries?” I inquire.

  “No, I’m good, no thanks.”

  “So what happened in the end with the basketball team? Who won?”

  “Oh, god, that’s a whole . . . oh, man,” he says, shaking his head. There’s a pregnant pause and another long blink.

  “Well, here’s how it went,” he continues slowly. “And maybe from this you can cull some interesting tidbit about the way Jay does what he does. We played through this tournament, and it was so exciting. And guess what happens for the final: it’s going to be the S. Carter Jay-Z team versus Fat Joe’s Terror Squad. The day has arrived . . .”

  As the morning of August 14 faded into the afternoon, the mercury climbed into the mid-90s, promising another heavy New York night at the Rucker for the final game of the season. Jay-Z had guided his team to the precipice of victory after a summer of scheming, schmoozing, cross-marketing, and testing his skills as a manager.

  A few hours before the game, Fab met up with Jay-Z to prepare in the air-conditioned cool of the studio, as usual. “But this day it was special,” remembers Fab. “Because now LeBron was going to play . . . and Shaquille O’Neal was in New York in a hotel as a secret weapon that was going to be brought into the park solo to play for us.”

  “And while I’m up in the studio, I have my guy plugging in some lights, he was going to interview one of the players, and all the lights go out in the studio. I go, ‘What happened?’ Then I hear some people upstairs saying there’s no lights. I’m like, ‘What’s going on in the building?’ ”

  The disturbance wasn’t unique to the studio. High electrical demand had forced a power plant near Cleveland offline, straining high-voltage rural power lines into a failure that cascaded across the entire electrical grid. The ensuing blackout left some fifty-five million citizens in the United States and Canada without electricity for nearly twenty-four hours. As traffic lights shut down, gridlock engulfed Manhattan. A deluge of wireless activity briefly rendered cell phones useless. Crawford and Curry were stuck in their hotel rooms. Fab and Jay-Z were stranded downtown, and the other players were scattered across the city. Telfair, who’d shown up early at the Rucker, had to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge. Without electricity, there was no way to light the nighttime asphalt at the storied courts.

  “It was havoc. There was confusion,” says Fab. “Bottom line, no game.”

  The tournament’s organizers rescheduled the game for the following week. But there was a major problem: Jay-Z had already booked a private jet for the next day, August 15, to whisk him and Beyoncé away for a two-week vacation to Europe, one of their first vacations together. They had to be back in New York for the MTV Video Music Awards on August 28 at Radio City Music Hall, where a slew of Beyoncé’s videos were up for awards—including “Crazy in Love,” featuring Jay-Z. Postponing their departure by a week would cut their vacation from two weeks to four or five days, and with Beyoncé set to start her first solo tour in the fall, there was no time to reschedule. Committed though he was to his basketball team, Jay-Z refused to cancel the trip and risk alienating his superstar girlfriend in what was still an early stage of their relationship.

  So when Fab showed up at the Rucker to document the final game the following week without Jay-Z, there was total chaos. “The team showed up but none of the ringers, because it’s only Jay that can make those calls and put those guys on flights,” he says. “There was a whole confrontation between the manager, the team, and the park guys . . . they decide that the game has been forfeited, and by default Fat Joe wins.” When Jay-Z returned from Europe, he told Fab to stop working on the film. The project was dead.

  “Jay-Z didn’t want to put it out. I didn’t want to, you know . . .” says Fab, trailing off. “It’s one of those interesting stories.” Fab’s tapes contain hours upon hours of footage, from candid interactions between Jay-Z and his players to shots of some of the best basketball ever to grace the Rucker. Yet they remain filed away, destined to fall short of the big screen. “Who knows? It could have run the festivals,” says Fab. “That was the pinnacle of the Rucker, in that period. It got so big, and that was kind of the crescendo tournament.”

  So, after a whole summer of meticulously organizing one of the best teams ever to set foot at New York’s most famous court this side of Madison Square Garden, why would Jay-Z scuttle the documentary that was going to put it all together? The answer is simple: he didn’t win. Jay-Z said all along that he was only going to do the tournament once, and that he was going to win. And though the final game was never played, the final game was never won, either. He felt that publicizing anything less than victory would somehow taint his legacy despite the other victories notched that summer—buzz, marketing, sneaker sales, and a stronger relationship with his future wife.

  He still managed to achieve those goals, even without scoring an official victory in the tournament; what he did win was much more important than what he didn’t win. These days, when people talk about the summer of 2003 at Rucker Park, they don’t remember that Team S. Carter forfeited the championship game. All they remember is a golden moment on the hallowed blacktop. “Everywhere I go, people still talk about it,” says Telfair. “It was a unique time for Rucker basketball. It’s always going to have hype, but it will never be done how Jay-Z did it.”

  It’s safe to say that there aren’t many who dwell on which team actually won the tournament. Except for maybe Jay-Z.

  5

  Early Retirement

  The date is November 25, 2003; the place, Madison Square Garden. The lights have just gone out, and a sellout crowd hums with anticipation. It might be the biggest retirement party in the history of retirement parties. Some twenty thousand spectators, including entertainers Sean Combs, Usher Raymond, Beyoncé Knowles, Kanye West, and Mary J. Blige, are here to celebrate thirty-three-year-old Jay-Z and the ostensible conclusion of his illustrious recording career.

  A single spotlight shines down from the rafters, revealing celebrity announcer Michael Buffer. Boxing bells clang the air clear. “L-l-ladies and gentlemen,” Buffer rumbles. “Tonight we’ve come to Madison Square Garden, New York City, to see and hear a legendary superstar.”<
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  “Uh-uh-uh,” grunts Jay-Z from a microphone offstage, bumping the buzzing crowd up a few more decibels.

  “From Marcy projects, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York,” Buffer booms, “presenting the one, the only, undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world of hip-hop, he is . . . JAY-Z!”

  The lights flash on, the bass thumps out the beat for Jay-Z’s “What More Can I Say,” and the main man saunters to the stage amid a swirl of white smoke. The stands tremble as he delivers his first line: “Never been a nigga this good for this long / This hood or this pop, this hot, or this strong!”1

  The crowd roars its agreement. Later in the evening, Jay-Z rhymes the motives behind his retirement to the thousands of adorers still undulating to his every word: “Jay’s status appears to be at an all-time high / Perfect time to say good-bye.”2

  It might be hard to believe that, just a few weeks shy of his thirty-fourth birthday, Jay-Z decided to call an end to his hip-hop recording career. But as he himself put it, he was already the Michael Jordan of hip-hop. Jordan retired for the first time at age thirty after doing everything there was to be done in basketball: specifically, winning three championships and three MVP awards in his first nine years. Jay-Z did hip-hop’s equivalent by notching seven platinum albums and a Grammy award in his first eight. In case he ever got the itch to rap again, Jay-Z reserved the right to “come back like Jordan” in a song on The Black Album.3

  The album featured production by some of the brightest stars in hip-hop, including Timbaland, the Neptunes, and Jay-Z protégé Kanye West. Absent were most of the producers who had churned out the strongest beats of Jay-Z’s early career—namely DJ Clark Kent, DJ Ski, and DJ Premier. The latter had planned to contribute a track, but Jay-Z wanted to release The Black Album on Black Friday, and this caused an unworkable scheduling conflict for Premier.4 Even so, when the album hit stores two weeks early in response to a leak, few critics complained about the absence of Reasonable Doubt’s wizened beat makers. “Old-school and utterly modern, it showed Jay at the top of his game,” declared Rolling Stone. “[He was] able to reinvent himself as a rap classicist at the right time, as if to cement his place in hip-hop’s legacy for generations to come.”5 Jay-Z’s supposed swan song earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album, and his song “99 Problems” won a Grammy for Best Solo Rap Performance.

  Jay-Z also authorized the release of an a cappella version of his album, thus encouraging scads of remixes—most notably The Grey Album, producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton’s mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album. The record clocked one hundred thousand digital downloads in a matter of days after EMI, which owns certain rights to the Beatles’ recordings, filed a cease and desist order.6 The publicity generated by The Grey Album and other mash-ups further publicized The Black Album, which went on to sell over three million copies.7 Though Jay-Z’s retirement would last only three years, many believed he was serious in 2003 when he said the album would be his final solo effort. “I think he thought so at the time,” says Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the drummer of the hip-hop ensemble the Roots, which backed Jay-Z at the Madison Square Garden concert. “And that maybe it was best to get out while he was ahead.”8

  Jay-Z was indeed ahead. But by November 2003, he had grown tired of hip-hop. He’d been struck, he claimed, by a sense of ennui, and left bored by a lack of competition. In his opinion, there wasn’t a Magic Johnson or a Larry Bird, or even a Charles Barkley, to his Jordan. “It’s not like it was with Big and Pac, hip-hop’s corny now,” he declared in 2003. “I love when someone makes a hot album and then you’ve got to make a hot album. I love that. But [hip-hop] ain’t hot.”9 Though he dabbled in different genres in the wake of his retirement from hip-hop, releasing platinum-selling collaborations with R&B singer R. Kelly and rock group Linkin Park, Jay-Z’s main motive for retirement was business. He wanted to shift from the music side to the management side of the recording industry, and as his rap career progressed, he sprinkled clues of this ambition throughout his oeuvre.

  Jay-Z’s early music videos portrayed the grit and grime of his Brooklyn upbringing and subsequent years as a hustler, taking MTV audiences from the comfort of their couches to the seedy motels he frequented as a drug runner in his adolescence. By 1998, Jay-Z seemed more concerned with impressing his audience with a preponderance of costly champagnes, tropical vacation locations, and women in bikinis. Within a few years, though, a more refined vision of success emerged—party atmosphere, yes, but something more befitting a billionaire oil tycoon than a successful drug dealer.

  Jay-Z’s video for “Excuse Me Miss,” a song released shortly before his retirement, gives a clue to the shift in his priorities. The video opens with the rapper sitting in a leather armchair, puffing a Zino Platinum cigar. He then advises viewers on appropriate champagne pairings for the video, as if it were a foie gras appetizer in need of a liquid complement. “You can’t even drink Cristal on this one,” he says with a wave of his cigar. “You’ve got to drink Cris-TAHL.”10 (At about $40 per cigar, Zino is among the world’s most expensive; Steve Stoute, a frequent Jay-Z business partner, helped launch the brand and holds a large equity stake.11)

  The rest of the video shows Jay-Z in a pin-striped suit, catching the eye of an elegant woman in a chic nightclub. Between descriptions of his Maybach land yacht waiting outside and prominent product placement of Roc-A-Fella’s Armadale Vodka, Jay-Z envisions the evolution of their relationship. He imagines text messaging the lucky lady from his BlackBerry while solving a corporate squabble late at night in a boardroom filled with dark-suited men; later, he pictures himself and his hypothetical girlfriend disembarking from a private jet onto a tarmac loaded with seven luxury cars, each adorned with a vanity plate bearing a different day of the week. At one point in the song, Jay-Z delivers the line “You know what I’m sitting on,” leading the audience to expect another vehicular boast, but instead mentions one of his business ventures. Though the song contains more high-end automobile advertisements than the latest issue of Robb Report, it’s clear that Jay-Z’s desire to be seen as a legitimate businessman trumps his need to be seen as a big spender, though the former certainly doesn’t cancel the latter. Still, for a rap video, the shift from simply flaunting wealth to flaunting wealth and explaining how it might be generated is an unusual—if not revolutionary—departure.

  The shift was also a function of Jay-Z wanting to keep his art true to his life. “I think the problem with people, as they start to mature, they say, ‘Rap is a young man’s game,’ and they keep trying to make young songs,” Jay-Z said in a 2010 interview. “I don’t want to stop listening to hip-hop when I’m fifty years old. But I don’t want to listen to something I can’t relate to. I can’t relate to a guy in a big mansion telling me he’s going to shoot me.”12

  Much as Jay-Z gave up the lucrative life of drug dealing so that he could focus on music, he gave up the young man’s game of rap to become a full-time businessman. The ventures that lured him away from the microphone were not limited to his existing portfolio of Rocawear, Roc-A-Fella Records, and the 40/40 Club, but included the possibility of other options down the line—namely, an executive position at a major record label.

  At Roc-A-Fella parent Def Jam, its parent Island Def Jam—and at Universal, the corporate parent of both—members of upper management had long flirted with the idea of offering Jay-Z an executive post. As time went on, he became more and more infatuated with the idea, going out of his way to curry favor with those who might be able to help him land such a position down the line.

  During a European vacation with Beyoncé in the summer of 2003—the trip he took instead of attending the rescheduled final game of the EBC—Jay-Z stopped in the south of France to meet with U2 front man Bono and Interscope Records CEO Jimmy Iovine. He left a strong impression on both. “He’s a talent, he’s a talent finder, he’s a record maker, he’s a magnet, he’s creative, he’s smart, he sees the music business as a
360 degrees [business] rather than just linear, he’s the modern record guy,” Iovine said in a 2005 interview. “He’s got great feel, he’s got great taste, and he knows how to market things. The rest you can learn.”13

  Months before his Madison Square Garden retirement concert in the fall of 2003, Jay-Z started having conceptual conversations with Doug Morris, Universal’s CEO, about joining the company’s management ranks. “I liked him because he comes from an entrepreneurial background,” Morris said two years later. “When you run a label you learn the whole thing, you get the broad idea of what this business is all about.”14

  Jay-Z got his chance in 2004, thanks to a complicated game of executive musical chairs set off by Seagram scion Edgar Bronfman Jr., chief of Warner Music Group, one of the industry’s four major record companies. Bronfman lured Lyor Cohen, a longtime Jay-Z mentor and president of Island Def Jam, to run Warner. Morris then filled the gap left by Cohen by hiring Antonio “L.A.” Reid, another Jay-Z admirer. Reid clashed with incumbent Def Jam president Kevin Liles, who then followed Cohen to Warner, leaving the Def Jam presidency vacant. Reid and Def Jam pounced, offering Jay-Z a lucrative three-year deal to become the label’s president.15

  While Jay-Z was weighing the offer, worth between $8 million and $10 million per year depending on performance bonuses, Warner tried to lure him with a job overseeing all of the company’s labels at a salary higher than the one offered by Def Jam, plus a substantial cut of Warner’s upcoming initial public offering. But Def Jam had one thing Warner didn’t—the rights to Jay-Z’s master recordings. Under Def Jam’s contract, his masters would revert to him within ten years. “It’s an offer you can’t refuse,” Jay-Z said of the Def Jam deal. “I could say to my son or my daughter, or my nephews if I never have kids, ‘Here’s my whole collection of recordings. I own those, they’re yours.’ ”16