Jay-z's New Book..... Decoded

Rapper Jay-z is out with a new book.It talks about issues and various aspects of his life from Oprah to 2pac and Notorious B.I.G to his dad.Check out excerpts from the book..........

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.

His First Hit
When Jay-Z recorded the song “Hard Knock Life” in 1998 — which made him a breakout star — he borrowed from the story of Little Orphan Annie. He said he found a “mirror” between his life and that of Annie’s. “The song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reality.” But first, he had to get clearance from the “Annie” franchise to use the “Hard Knock Life” chorus in his anthem. Initially, he was turned down. So he wrote the company a letter, making up a tale about how, when he was in the seventh grade, his teacher held an essay contest. The prize: A trip to the city to see “Annie.” This was, he writes, “A lie. I wrote that. . . I felt like I understood honey’s story.” The company believed Jay-Z’s tale and cleared the rights to what became his first mega-hit.

Dealing with Success
Jay-Z writes about the danger hip-hop stars face — mostly at the hands of other hip-hop artists — when they become famous. Of close friend the Notorious B.I.G., who, along with Tupac Shakur, who were shot and killed at their peak, he says: “They were both perfectly safe before they started rapping; they weren’t being hunted by killers until they got into music. Biggie was on the streets before he started releasing music, but he never had squads of shooters (or the Feds) coming after him until he was famous.”
He recalls meeting with Eminem in the studio in 2003 to record “Moment of Clarity” for Jay-Z’s “Black Album.” When Jay-Z went to hug his friend, he realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest. At the time, Eminem had three multiplatinum albums and a No. 1 film, “8 Mile.” Jay-Z believed Eminem should have been “on a boat somewhere” without the worry of being shot or attacked by an enemy from the underworld of rap.

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.”

Meeting Oprah
Jay-Z first met Oprah Winfrey at a dinner party. Winfrey disavows hip-hop for its violence, but the two got to talking and it came up that Jay-Z had read “The Seat of the Soul,” “a book that really affected the way I think about life,” he writes. Oprah had also read the book, which is about the power of positive thinking. The book’s author, Gary Zukav, had been a guest on her show a few times. “Oprah expressed surprise that I also was a fan of his work. She didn’t expect that of a rapper,” he writes.

Befriending Obama
A friend of President Obama’s helped set up a meeting with Jay-Z in 2008, he says. The two talked for hours. “I wish I could remember a specific moment when it hit me that this guy was special. But it wasn’t like that,” he writes. “It was the fact that he sought me out and then asked question after question about music, about where I’m from, about what people in my circle — the wider circle that reaches . . . all the way back to Marcy — were thinking about politically.”
When Beyoncé sang at the inauguration, he writes, he watched from the audience instead of backstage so he could “feel the energy of everyday people. It was unbelievable to see us — me, Beyoncé, Puff, and other people I’ve known for so long — sharing in this rite of passage.