“I didn’t have to work at it,” Jay-Z said. “I’ve always rapped, like recreation. It wasn’t like I was doing it for any reason.”
It was February 2000 and Jay-Z was talking to Q magazine in his office high above the streets of New York City.
Looking back on his formative years, he added: “I never really knew how good I was at rapping till people started telling me. It was so easy for me, I didn’t know. If you don’t work at something, if it comes so easy to you, it ain’t nothing.”
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In this interview he was promoting Vol. 3… Life And Times Of S. Carter – in fact his fourth album, despite its title.
This was his second consecutive No 1 album on the US Billboard 200, and he was already feeling that his high profile was in some aspects a problem.
“It happens with a lot of young black people who get famous,” he said. “What we wanna do is just party with our people, and it’s tough because you’re a superstar. You try to put yourself in regular situations but you have to realise – you’re not a regular person.
“People judge you every day. You’re in a club and you just wanna party with your people. I don’t wanna be the centre of attention, I wanna party with you, I don’t want everybody just looking at me.”
He explained: “I have the same people around that I always had from day one, and it’s not like you drive eight miles into the woods to get to my home. But when you’re in a business like this you never feel like you’re home. You need a kind of separation to get your thoughts clear.”
Jay-Z’s previous album, Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life, had been dismissed as superficial by some critics.
He responded: “I have to take those comments with a grain of salt, because when I made my second album [In My Lifetime, Vol. 1] they said I was too emotional. Now they say I’m too superficial! You’re confusing me, people!
“You know that 2Pac song Only God Can Judge Me? Now I understand what he was feeling! When they said I was too emotional, that made me make Hard Knock Life, so I guess it was to be. They were supposed to say that so I could make that next record.
“Like, I know what y’all want from me. My experiences, the things I went through, the emotions I can put into a record, those are my strengths.”
Discussing his creative process, he talked about how he was able to write an entire song in as little as 20 minutes.
“That’s when it works best for me, when it’s done on the spot and it’s not doctored.”
He had also worked fast to ghostwrite the lyrics to Dr. Dre’s 1999 hit Still D.R.E., performed by Dre with Snoop Dogg.
“It’s fun for me to step outside of myself and create for someone else,” Jay-Z said. “To put yourself in their shoes. You have to think what they’re thinking. It’s just a very creative thing to do. I already know what I’m thinking, and I know what I think people think of me, but to do that with another person, it’s just fun.
“I think I really, really nailed it with the Dre record, Still D.R.E. That was a perfect record for him. I didn’t know Dre, but I knew his work.”
Jay-Z also told Q about his friendship with legendary rapper Biggie Smalls, AKA The Notorious B.I.G. Biggie made a guest appearance on the track Brooklyn’s Finest from Jay-Z’s 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt. But they had first met as school kids.
“That was a passive thing,” Jay-Z recalled of their early association. “It was after we did Brooklyn’s Finest that we started clicking.
“We would always see each other and say, ‘We gotta make a song together.’ So when I was recording my first album, I reached out to him, and he came through. He sat in the studio and vibed, no paper, just listening to the music and rapping off the top of his head. I see him doing the same thing I’m doing, and it was just as much a shock to him to see me doing it as it was for me to see him doing it.”
Eventually a beef between Biggie and Tupac Shakur ended with both men shot dead.
Jay-Z reflected on their rivalry and its tragic consequences: “At the time when it was going on, I didn’t know – nobody knew – how powerful two rappers could be. Big said it: they only had a problem with each other. He never said, ‘I hate the West Coast.’ And Tupac never said, ‘I hate the East Coast’.’ They had a problem and everybody just took sides. ‘He’s from my coast, I’m sticking with him.’”
This rivalry had escalated with 2Pac’s song Hit ’Em Up, in which he raged at Biggie and his East Coast connections.
But as Jay-Z said: “I really thought it was just a music thing. You gotta figure, the foundation of rap is built on battling. That’s what they would do, they’d throw parties and see who could throw down the hardest. So I still was looking at it like, ‘Wow, he’s going at him hard – what’s next? Where’s the next record?’ I thought it was just music.”
In the Q interview, Jay-Z was asked what scared him. His answer pointed to his future as a multi-tasking entrepreneur.
“What scares me is going backwards,” he said. “I try new things, take on new challenges, instead of just making an album. I try to break new artists, after that a film company, a successful clothing company, just new challenges.”
He said he believed in God.
“I’m not a person who’s into organised religion, going to church and things like that,” he said. “I think if you’re a spiritual person, you can worship God in your own way. You don’t need anybody to tell you how to do it, you don’t have to go to no church.”
Finally, he was asked if he prayed.
He replied: “I give thanks a lot, you know what I’m saying? Some of the things I’m saying are beyond me. Wow, where that came from? I give thanks.”
