2…Hard Knock Life, featuring a title track which sampled the Broadway hit song “Hard Knock Life” from Annie. Signing with Def Jam Records in 1997 and a year later, released Vol. The release of Reasonable Doubt was the first step to a monstrously successful career. The album went on to reach #23 on the Billboard 200, sell 1.5 million units and be listed as one of Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Selling his CDs out of the trunk of his car, Jay-Z’s hustle paid off when he struck a distribution deal with Priority Records and released Reasonable Doubt in 1996. Now going by Jay-Z, the cocky young upstart battle rapped against fellow New York MC LL Cool J and worked as hype man for rap legend Big Daddy Kane. As a young teenager, he began selling crack cocaine as well as experimenting with music, banging out drum patterns, writing lyrics and freestyling rhymes. Gatsby was a man, a mere mortal, damned and doomed from the onset, whereas Jay-Z is also Jay-Hova, and gods are not as easily felled.īorn in Bedford-Stuyvesant on December 4, 1969, Shawn Corey Carter was born in the projects amidst roaches, rats and a thriving drug culture. One noteworthy difference between Gatsby and Jay-Z? Scott Fitzgerald’s eponymous parvenu and the Brooklyn-born MC sprung from conceptions of themselves – impoverished Midwestern teenager James Gatz morphed into the infamous Jay Gatsby while Shawn Carter took on the nom de rappeur Jay-Z.īoth knew the excesses and trappings of extraordinary wealth as young men and both fell in love with golden girl goddesses with voices full of money. The life and times of Shawn Carter are a blueprint of the American Dream and bear striking resemblance to one of modern American fiction’s greatest protagonists, Jay Gatsby.īoth F. To carve out an identity wholly one’s own and to succeed beyond one’s wildest imagination.
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