Jay-Z - Decoded (Excerpts)

The New York Post has published a few excerpts from Jay-Z’s upcoming literary endeavor Decoded. The autobiography – which hits shelves November 16 – interprets lyrics to 36 of his songs but also covers important happenings and developments in Mr. Carter’s coming of age. The excerpts shed light to some heavily discussed points in the life of the mogul. Read a few below and some more here.

Almost Famous

Even though he was still dealing drugs, whenever Jay-Z came back to New York he met with his friend Jaz, another rhymer, and the two would lock themselves in a room “with a pen, a pad, and some Apple Jacks and Haagen Dazs.” Jaz got a record deal with EMI in 1989, and Jay-Z took note when the record company dropped his friend after his single flopped. “I thought to myself, ‘This business sucks.’ No honor, no integrity; it was disgusting. In some ways it was worse than the streets.” Jay-Z learned from that experience and started his own label, Roc-a-fella, in 1994, with Damon Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke.

The Lance Rivera incident

Jay-Z glosses over his 1999 stabbing of record producer Lance Rivera, which resulted in the rapper pleading guilty to assault and receiving three years probation. He says he was infuriated because someone had leaked a bootleg copy of “Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter” more than a month before the release date of the album. When he asked who was behind the leak, everyone kept repeating the same name: Rivera. When Jay-Z saw him at rapper Q-Tip’s album release party at the Kit Kat Klub, he confronted him. Rivera “got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club,” Jay-Z writes, “It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar . . . I was . . . in a state of shock . . . I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger.”

After this, chaos ensued in the club, “That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.” He says he decided to plead guilty after watching Puff Daddy’s trial on weapons violations that same year. Puffy was acquitted, and Jay-Z says he feared the state would be harder on him after failing to convict his friend.

“The hilarious thing,” he writes, “if any of this can be considered funny, is that the Rocawear bubble coat I was wearing when they paraded me in front of the cameras started flying off the shelves the last three weeks before Christmas.”

Coming to Terms With Dad

The song “Moment of Clarity” deals with the abandonment by his father when Jay-Z was 11. He says he realized only later that his father, Adnis Reeves, began to unravel after his brother, Jay-Z’s Uncle Ray, was murdered outside a Brooklyn club and the cops never found the killer. “My dad swore revenge and became obsessed with hunting down Uncle Ray’s killer. The tragedy — compounded by the injustice — drove him crazy, sent him to the bottle, and ultimately became a factor in the unraveling of my parents’ marriage.” He only reunited with his dad, at his mother’s urging, three months before his dad died of liver disease in 2003. But he writes, “By the time he left, he’d given me a lot of what I’d need to survive.”

Source: Nah Right