Description

Jay-Z is a rapper, writer, producer, and entrepreneur whose life reflects the rise of hip-hop to the epicenter of global popular culture. Raised in a Brooklyn housing project, Shawn Carter was at first called "Jazzy," and it morphed into Jay-Z. Like a jazz musician, he improvises all his raps when recording, and his strength is his flow—his fast, smooth wordplay and flow of ideas. Carter's stage persona as Jay-Z mixes his past as a drug dealer from the ’hood—"Bed-Stuy was my country / Brooklyn my planet," he raps—with the swagger of a Rockefeller (his clothing line is called Roc-a-Fella). He represents a millennial synthesis of American culture’s love of outlaws, who live in opposition to social approval, with its love of extreme wealth, which insulates a person from everyday pressures. What happens when an inner-city party music and political forum becomes the soundtrack of global capitalism? Jay-Z’s "Hard Knock Life" is the "ghetto anthem" of these ironies.

Record Contributed By

National Portrait Gallery

Record Harvested From

Smithsonian Institution