With the sample approved, the Roots’ Game Theory went on to sell sixty-one thousand copies in its first week,14 a respectable figure for a band that had always been more of an artistic act than a pop sensation. Jay-Z encouraged the group to stay true to that philosophy. “The pressure that you would think would be on us, i.e., ‘I want that radio song, don’t come in here unless you’ve got a hit,’ was the exact opposite,” remembers Questlove. “Jay was like, ‘You’d better give me the art record I expect from you guys, because I’m gonna have the whole world out to castrate me if I change their beloved Roots.’ ” Sure enough, the Roots’ album made up in critical reception what it lacked in sales. The album earned four stars out of four from USA Today, which applauded the Roots for exhibiting “a ferocity they haven’t displayed in years”;15 positive reviews also flowed in from Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, the latter of which specifically praised Jay-Z for not making the Roots “go commercial.”16
Jay-Z had other artists to lean on for raw sales, and by the end of his first summer as Def Jam’s chief, those numbers started to show. Kanye West and Young Jeezy both put out albums that went platinum with Jay-Z’s help; Rihanna’s debut sold five hundred thousand copies in six months, as did the rookie effort of rapper Rick Ross, another Jay-Z recruit, in 2006.17 Perhaps just as important as the songs released by these artists were the songs held back. When Kanye West was putting together his first album, Jay-Z implored him not to include a song called “Hey Mama,” fearing it would get lost in the shuffle of West’s debut. On his mentor’s advice, West saved the track, and it helped propel his next offering, Late Registration, to triple-platinum sales and a Grammy award for Best Rap Album.
Nurturing the careers of these artists was one of Jay-Z’s great successes during his time at Def Jam, and his peers in the executive ranks took note. “It was definitely something that you saw, his skills as an executive and his skills as a creative A&R [artists and repertoire] person,” says Craig Kallman, chief executive of Atlantic Records. “He certainly masterminded the Rihanna signing and launch and creatively spearheaded that. He oversaw Rick Ross and galvanized the company behind Rick. I think he did a great job.”18
In early 2006, Jay-Z made perhaps his boldest move by reconciling with former nemesis Nas and signing the rapper to Def Jam, banking that defusing their conflict would sell more records than fanning the flames. As noted earlier, the two performed in concert together in 2005, much to the surprise of a crowd expecting Jay-Z to ratchet up the rivalry’s rhetoric. Nas’s initial Def Jam effort, Hip-Hop Is Dead, hit stores a year later. Jay-Z appeared on the track “Black Republicans,” and the album sold an impressive 355,000 copies in its first week.19
“If you ask me to grade my performance as the president, I’d say A-plus,” Jay-Z boasted in a 2009 interview. “No one can bat 1.000. It’s impossible. I mean, everyone is looking at my shit. But if we really looked under the hood [of every record executive] and the acts they put out at the time, I’d be comparable to anyone.”20
Though Jay-Z sometimes gives his audience the impression that business is more important to him than rap (“I’m just a hustler disguised as a rapper,” he claims in one song21), many people who’ve spent time with him believe his heart is in music. Patrick “A Kid Called Roots” Lawrence, who produced the hit song “Do My . . .” for Memphis Bleek, recalls witnessing Jay-Z’s passion firsthand in 2000.
Lawrence had been dispatched to Japan by Lyor Cohen, then-chief of Def Jam, to help start the label’s Japanese division. In the midst of Lawrence’s three-month stay in Tokyo, Jay-Z came to the city for the first time to perform a concert. When the rapper noticed Lawrence at the show, he invited him to come onstage. Lawrence obliged and couldn’t help but notice that the five thousand Japanese fans in the audience—many of whom didn’t speak English at all—knew all the words to Jay-Z’s songs. After his first set, Jay-Z took a break and let Memphis Bleek perform a few songs, including Lawrence’s “Do My . . .” Lawrence would never have expected what came next.
“Jay-Z pulls me to the edge of the stage . . . and for three minutes I perform ‘Do My . . .’ with Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek,” Lawrence recalls. “Incredible. It was like a dream. I mean, the energy. Now I see why, with all his success and his money—he claims he’s just a hustler—at the end of the day, he really has a passion for the music. He loves it, he thrives for that feeling of being on that stage and seeing what that’s like. ’Cause I really felt it right then. When I got off that stage, I was like, ‘I want to be a rap star.’ ”22
Wanting to be a rap star again, and feeling that rush anew, was ultimately what drew Jay-Z back to the microphone in 2006. A desire to prop up sales at Def Jam, not to mention the constant desire to add funds to his own ballooning bank account, obviously contributed to Jay-Z’s decision as well. And for someone who’d stopped releasing solo albums three years earlier because he was bored with hip-hop, the opportunity to ride in on a white horse as the industry’s savior was too tempting to pass up.
His comeback album, Kingdom Come, hit stores in November 2006 and sold over two million copies in its first three weeks. “I don’t know what life will be in H-I-P-H-O-P without the boy H-O-V,” he crows at the start of the album’s title track, referencing his lordly nickname. “Not only N-Y-C, but hip-hop’s savior / So after this flow, you might owe me a favor, when Kingdom Come.”23 Despite decent commercial success and his own blustering bravado, Jay-Z’s new album earned him some of the roughest reviews of his career, not to mention a few barbs about his age. “We never thought Jay would be flashing AARP brochures in our faces and dropping Gwyneth Paltrow’s name in a rap song,” raged Pitchfork’s Peter Macia in a review. “But that’s Kingdom Come: Jay boringly rapping about boring stuff and being totally comfortable with it.”24
Perhaps because he was itching to redeem himself, perhaps because he just wanted to make another album, Jay-Z quickly followed Kingdom Come with another, grittier album in 2007. That summer, Jay-Z attended a private screening of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (coincidentally, the event was set up by his aforementioned intern, Simmons). Inspired by the film’s content—the rise and fall of 1970s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington—Jay-Z churned out an album of the same title in a matter of weeks. Falling back from the name-dropping and soft subject matter of Kingdom Come, Jay-Z returned to the mafioso mentality that birthed his first album. That was clear from the opening line of American Gangster’s first song: “Mind state of a gangster from the forties meets the business mind of Motown’s Berry Gordy / Turn crack rock into a chain of 40/40s,” he raps, not forgetting to toss in some free advertising for his nightclubs. “America, meet the gangster Shawn Corey. Hey, young world, wanna hear a story? Close your eyes, and you could pretend you’re me.”25
The rest of the album told that story. This time, the critical response was much warmer. “He packs his wordy stanzas full of unexpected syllables, clever allusions, and unpredictable rhyme schemes,” declared the New York Times. “This is probably as close as the new Jay-Z will ever come to sounding like the old Jay-Z.”26 A few days later Rolling Stone proclaimed, “Forget Frank Lucas: the real black superhero here is Jay, and with American Gangster, [he’s] back.”27 On the album, Jay-Z painted himself as an analog to Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas in American Gangster: clever, pragmatic, unflappable. Those who spent significant time with Jay-Z during this phase of his career tend to reinforce the comparison. “I’ve never really seen this guy sweat,” explained Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, a former Roc-A-Fella sound engineer, in 2009. “That’s a running joke that we have: he’s an alien, because I’ve never seen him sweat . . . I’ve never seen Jay super angry, or he doesn’t show it. It’s always the poker face.”28
The major exception to that rule was the Lance Rivera stabbing of 1999. Jay-Z was lucky to strike a plea deal that didn’t include jail time; in Vibe’s December 2000 cover story, he called the incident a “learning experience.” Apparently it wa
s. Weeks before American Gangster hit the stores in 2007, tracks from the album leaked. Though he was upset, Jay-Z found himself playing the role of coolheaded boss at Def Jam. “People were panicking,” recalls Simmons. “But I never heard [Jay-Z] yell or flip out or anything. He’s just an even-keel kind of guy.” Or at least, he’d learned how to be an even-keel kind of guy in the years following the Rivera incident.
Though Jay-Z attended a single therapy session (he said all the psychiatrist did was give him tea that made him sleepy),29 there were a number of external factors that took some pressure off him in the years between the two leaks. There was reconciliation with his father, stability with Beyoncé, and security in his status at the top of the hip-hop world. Coupled with the effects of time and experience, the Jay-Z of 2007 was quite a different person from the Jay-Z of 1999. “I think he just grew up,” says Simmons. “He even says it in his songs: I used to be the dude wearing jerseys and stuff, but now I’m a businessman. I gotta get corporate. I gotta put on a suit and a button-up shirt.”
Jay-Z had mastered his own emotions, transforming the vengeful urges of his youth into the sort of unflappability that would prove invaluable in the boardroom. With that change—and the wealth of executive experience he’d gained at Def Jam—he found a world of new business opportunities available to him. Jay-Z’s polish and poise would eventually take him to corporate pastures even greener than Def Jam, but in the meantime, he turned his attention to something quite literally related to green pastures and fields: the champagne industry.
7
Champagne Secrets
On a frigid February night, I’m waiting outside the door of a ground-floor apartment in Harlem, beginning to wonder if I’ve got the wrong address. The barred windows on either side of me are dark. In the middle of the door, a large Black Panther logo obscures a glass pane that rattles faintly as the subway grumbles below. I ring the bell for a third time. No response.
Suddenly, a voice calls my name. I turn around. Striding toward me amid a majestic cascade of dreadlocks is Branson B., the man credited with introducing champagne to hip-hop. He gave rap legend Notorious B.I.G. his first taste of Cristal, the $500-a-bottle French bubbly that quickly joined Mercedes-Benz and Gucci as rap’s most frequently mentioned brands. Branson himself has been mentioned in over sixty songs. (Appropriately for rap’s unofficial sommelier, the abbreviated B is short for Belchie.1)
Branson greets me with a handshake and a chest bump and opens the door. We enter a dim foyer stacked to the ceiling with case upon case of his personal label of Guy Charlemagne wine. He leads the way through another door into a room dominated by a full-sized bar. “I made it myself,” he says, pulling up a pair of stools. Then he disappears back into the foyer.
I feel like I’ve fallen through a rabbit hole into an oenophilic wonderland. Scattered before me are at least twenty bottles of wine and champagne in varying states of consumption; dozens more adorn the shelves behind the counter. Resting on a table next to the bar is a plasterboard sign with the words BRANSON B. CUVÉE emblazoned over the silhouette of a dreadlocked man. The walls are coated with cutouts from wine publications. A deflated purple birthday balloon hangs in the corner.
Branson bustles back into the room, the foil neck of a champagne bottle peeking out over the rim of the ice bucket in his arms. “One of Jay-Z’s favorite drinks is the Taittinger Rosé Comtes—we called that the ‘Food of the Gods,’ ” he says, recalling the rare $300 bottle made from France’s finest Chardonnay grapes. “One time I remember I came in, and Biggie and Jay were in the studio, and they had a bottle on the table, and Jay kind of looked at me and smiled because he knew it was something I introduced him to.”
Branson puts down the bucket and lowers himself onto the stool next to me.
“Last time I seen Jay, he said, ‘Damn, every time I see you, I think about Biggie,’ ” Branson continues. “I always used to come through and bring them different things, and we used to sit around and drink together and enjoy,” he says. “They’d be like, ‘Yo, this is good.’ And it seemed to be a thing of, ‘Damn, I’ve never seen this before, never tasted this before!’’Cause it’s new.”
Still glancing around the room, my eyes fall on an empty gold bottle of Armand de Brignac, another trendy $300 champagne. “Respectfully, I didn’t care for it,” Branson pipes in, as if reading my mind. “I didn’t think it was worth the money. When I initially tasted it, it was a little young, so I really didn’t like it.”
He gestures to a neighboring bottle whose ridged surface makes it look like the love child of an armadillo and a grenade. “This is a Nicolas Feuillatte Palmes d’Or Rosé, 1999,” he says. “I happened to go to a liquor store in New Jersey, and I was looking for something special for my birthday, and I ran into that. I really enjoyed it. It was nice, and it was different.”
“This,” he says, pointing back to the gilded Armand de Brignac, “is more the aesthetics, the pretty bottle—and everything that goes along with it.”
What goes along with Armand de Brignac is Jay-Z. The rapper put the flashy gold bottle on the map when he featured it in his 2006 video for “Show Me What You Got,” a single from his comeback album Kingdom Come. The four-minute video begins with a shot of a car parked on a bluff overlooking Monaco. The camera pans in to reveal Jay-Z sitting in a Ferrari F430 Spyder convertible, his foot hanging nonchalantly over the side. An exotic Pagani Zonda roadster pulls up next to him, piloted by IndyCar driver Danica Patrick.
“What you got?” Jay-Z asks Patrick, adjusting his sunglasses. Then he leans back to reveal his driver: NASCAR veteran Dale Earnhardt Jr.
The music begins, Patrick shrugs, and the two cars zoom off in a mountainside race inspired by the opening sequence of the James Bond flick GoldenEye. Later in the video, Jay-Z arrives at a rollicking party on what appears to be a private island. As the third verse begins, he raps about the “gold bottles of the Ace of Spades.” He then becomes embroiled in a high-stakes game of blackjack with swimsuit model Jarah Mariano, who’s holding two queens. Jay-Z, naturally, has both the king and ace of spades. The video fades into an orgy of belly dancing, hand waving, and other forms of enjoyment presumably available only to those who attend parties at medium-size private islands off the coast of Monaco (though a quick search on Google Earth reveals that there are, in fact, no such islands off the coast of Monaco).
The video is typical of mainstream hip-hop, with one possible exception: toward the end of the video, a waiter presents Jay-Z with a bottle of Cristal champagne, and Jay-Z declines with a sweep of his hand. In its place, he accepts a gold bottle of then-unknown Armand de Brignac. This may not seem terribly meaningful in the abstract, but coming from someone who’d been rapping Cristal’s praises for years—and once bragged that he was “popping that Cristal when all y’all thought it was beer”2—it marked a major departure.
Jay-Z’s sudden change in attitude toward the pricey bubbly wasn’t without cause. In June 2006, months before the video’s release, a reporter from the Economist asked Frédéric Rouzaud, manager of the Louis Roederer house that produces Cristal, what he thought of rappers drinking his champagne. “That’s a good question,” Rouzaud replied. “But what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.”3
As soon as Jay-Z caught wind of the comments, he publicly denounced Rouzaud. Cristal was one of the only brands Jay-Z had been willing to promote for free in his songs, but a slight of this nature was grounds for a boycott. “It has come to my attention that the managing director of Cristal, Frédéric Rouzaud, views the hip-hop culture as ‘unwelcome attention,’ ” he declared. “I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products through any of my various brands including the 40/40 Club nor in my personal life.”4
The mainstream media joined industry observers to weigh in on Jay-Z’s statement. “Don’t drop a bomb like ‘racist’ when what you’re dealing with is a skirmish over im
age,” the Washington Post admonished.5 “Hell hath no fury like a rap impresario dissed,” noted Slate.6 Roberto Rogness, an NPR commentator and general manager of Santa Monica’s Wine Expo, offered another suggestion: “If Jay-Z really wanted to show them what for, he should buy Roederer and give it to Beyoncé for a wedding present!”7
Meanwhile, Cristal’s golden image was starting to tarnish. Though demand continued to outpace supply worldwide, Jay-Z’s boycott had a noticeable effect on sales. “I’ve noticed a slight drop-off in Cristal in the club,” said Noel Ashman, owner of Manhattan’s Plumm, a favorite celebrity nightspot. “You have to recognize how deeply respected Jay-Z is, so his position definitely will have an effect.”8 Though Jay-Z initially replaced Cristal with Krug and Dom Pérignon in his clubs as Rouzaud had mockingly suggested, the release of the “Show Me What You Got” video on October 10 immediately established Armand de Brignac as his favorite. The use of the “Ace of Spades” moniker—a possible reclamation of the word spade, a slur used against African Americans—can also be seen as a clever swipe at Rouzaud’s perceived racism.
By simply associating himself with Armand de Brignac, Jay-Z was able to almost single-handedly lift the brand from obscurity to the heights of celebrity chic. Proprietors of many American liquor stores reported that sales of Armand de Brignac were quickly catching up to the older bubbly. “Our sales of Armand de Brignac are rivaling Cristal,” said Christian Navarro, a shop owner in Brentwood, California. “They’ve managed to shortcut one hundred and fifty years of traditional marketing.”9
Some observers pointed out that Armand de Brignac, which shared its first four letters with Jay-Z’s Armadale Vodka, could be Jay-Z’s latest business venture. He wasn’t shy about his connection to the spirit, but that product flopped; the last major news story about the vodka came in 2005, when a case disappeared en route to Mariah Carey’s birthday party.10 In the wake of Jay-Z’s split with Dash and Burke, there was no chance he’d enrich his former partners by rapping about Armadale (the spirit has since vanished from the public eye and store shelves altogether, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database has listed the brand as “DEAD” since May 2, 200911).
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