Empire State of Mind

At that point in time Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G., Biggie Smalls, Biggie, or just Big, had ascended to the pinnacle of the rap world with his knack for darkly comical ghetto storytelling. The three-hundredfifty-pound Brooklyn native delivered rhymes with a melodic huskiness; you could almost hear the cholesterol in his voice when he rapped. His 1994 debut, Ready to Die, sold over two million copies in its first year, doubling that figure by the turn of the century. The album featured hits like “Big Poppa” and “Juicy,” both of which garner ample radio play to this day; many consider him the greatest rapper of all time.

Biggie employed Clark Kent as his DJ on tour, and this relationship led to Biggie’s appearance on Jay-Z’s song “Brooklyn’s Finest.” The spirited duet showed that Jay-Z could hold his own against rap’s biggest star, further raising his profile. But the collaboration might not have happened if it weren’t for a fortuitous coincidence that occurred at the end of a recording session with Clark Kent and Biggie. Like most producers, Kent carried a bunch of beats around with him on tape at all times; different beats were slated to go to different artists. On this particular occasion, Biggie heard something meant for someone else—and liked it a little too much.

“I forgot to hit the stop button, and instead I hit the forward button, and it went to the next beat, and the next beat was the ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’ beat,” recalls Kent. “Big had one boot off, sock halfway off, ran all the way to the back like, ‘Is that for me?’ And I’m like, ‘Nah, it’s for Jay.’ He said, ‘Why you give this mothafucka everything?’ . . . I was like, ‘Listen, my man’s incredible, he’s the best. Respectfully, ’cause I know you’re a monster. But my man’s like the best.’ ”

Just as he convinced Jay-Z to stop hustling and focus on the music, Kent went to work gently prodding both sides to come together and do the song. Though Jay-Z went to the same high school as Biggie, the two were years apart and didn’t really know each other. To further complicate matters, record producer and friend Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo warned Jay-Z that doing a song with Biggie might make Jay-Z seem like a sidekick. “I did not want that record to happen,” said Gotti. “I was adamantly against it. I would call Jay every day like, ‘No, fuck that! Don’t do this record.’ I said, ‘What I’m scared of is you doin’ [a record] with Biggie and you comin’ off like his little man. And, nigga, we can’t be owning shit if you his little man. You never gon’ get that throne.’ But [Jay-Z] would call me and be like, ‘Nah, but, Gotti, I’m tellin’ you, I’m gonna show ’em.’ ”²

So when Kent arrived at the studio and broached the topic of a collaboration, Jay-Z played it cool and Dash remained leery of letting someone else take any of their glory or money, especially Sean “Diddy” Combs, Biggie’s close friend and boss at Bad Boy Records. Known in those days as Puffy or Puff, Combs hadn’t yet solidified his friendship with Jay-Z and Dash. “[Jay]’s looking at me like, ‘I ain’t know that guy,’ ” remembers Kent. “Dame says, ‘And, plus, I ain’t payin’ Puff shit. Fuck Puff.’ Those exact words. So I’m like, ‘Well, he’s my man, I could talk to him.’ In my mind, I’m knowing Big wants to be on the beat regardless.”

Unbeknownst to Jay-Z and Dash, Biggie was waiting in a car downstairs. After Jay-Z recorded his verse, Kent slipped out to get Biggie. “I’m like, ‘Yo, I’m going to the bathroom,’ ” he recalls. “I go downstairs and I bring Big back up. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re a funny nigga.’ So I’m like, ‘That’s my man. Big, Jay. Jay, Big. Uh, Dame.’ ”

With Kent’s madcap introduction completed, Jay-Z and Dash consented to the collaboration. Electrified by the challenge, Jay-Z went back into the booth and rerecorded his verses, leaving empty spaces in between for Biggie to record his. “Almost practically to a different song,” Kent remembers. “He puts his breaks where they go and he says his verses where they are and the spaces are there. So Big’s like, ‘I can’t fuck with it right now, I need to go home with that.’ So he had to take it home to fill in the blanks. And he saw Jay do it without a pen. The funny part is, everybody thinks that Big never wrote his rhymes down. And that wasn’t the case. He did, until he saw Jay do that.”

Two months later, Biggie met Jay-Z at the studio and recorded his verses. Afterward, he and Jay-Z walked out of the studio together, leaving Clark Kent to come up with the hook. “They were like, ‘Yeah, scratch something,’ ” recalls Kent. “That’s how cavalier things went with the album. When Mary J. Blige sang on the song, it wasn’t like, ‘Yo, we gotta go get Mary J. Blige.’ It was like, ‘I know Mary, she sings. Let’s give her some money.’ ”

When “Brooklyn’s Finest” started reaching eardrums in 1996, the reactions were exactly what Jay-Z had been hoping for. Rather than defer to the legend, Jay-Z fired back clever rhymes of his own, and the playful sparring between the two elevated the status of both rappers. Listeners saw Jay-Z not as the Scottie Pippen to Biggie’s Michael Jordan, but as the Kobe Bryant or the LeBron James—the heir apparent. Rolling Stone described the song as “two hungry talents seemingly aware that they had no one to outduel but each other.”³

The connection proved especially valuable in the late 1990s, when Jay-Z started moving toward a more pop-oriented sound. Where other rappers might have been cast as sellouts, Jay-Z was able to maintain a high level of credibility because of his relationship with the highly respected Biggie. “That’s something that burnished his credentials with the underground crowd while he was moving solidly toward trying to do more mainstream work,” explains Jeff Chang, the author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. “It was important for him to say, ‘Yo, I’m the kid that was on the street just like Big.’ ”⁴

As much as Jay-Z derived from his relationship with Biggie, Clark Kent believes the latter rapper gained even more. “It was great for Jay, yes, but in retrospect, it was better for Big,” he says. “Because when you hear Big’s first album, it was remarkable. But when you hear Big’s second album, after he met Jay, it was untouchable. [Jay-Z] made him up the ante.”⁵

Flush with the success of their respective classics—Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die in 1994 and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt in 1996—and still riding the success of “Brooklyn’s Finest,” the pair began discussing plans to start a gangster rap supergroup. The Commission, as it was called, would feature Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. headlining a group that also included Combs, female rapper Charli Baltimore, and a host of others. “The Commission was going to [put out an album] of proportions that no one could fuck with,” says Kent. “The lyrical ability on the album was going to be outstanding. That’s that. The two best MCs in the game making records together would have been super-dangerous.”

One of the reasons for Biggie’s high profile was the vicious enmity between him and former friend Shakur. The conflict started when Shakur was shot five times in the lobby of a New York studio where Biggie and Combs were recording. Believing he’d been set up (though there’s never been evidence to support those claims), Shakur responded with vitriolic lyrics that launched arguably the most potent verbal warfare in the history of hip-hop. Thanks in part to his association with Biggie, Jay-Z’s name came up more than a few times during the infamous feud. Shakur, who’d first met Jay-Z as a skinny teenager on Big Daddy Kane’s tour, even leveled a direct threat in the song “Bomb First”: “I’m a Bad Boy killer, Jay-Z die too.” But Shakur was gunned down on the Las Vegas strip in 1996; Biggie suffered the same fate on the streets of Los Angeles just months later. Plans for The Commission died with him.

By the time Jay-Z gained mainstream fame in the late 1990s, he had no major adversary, no Tupac to his Biggie, nobody who could raise both his profile and his record sales with a war of words. The only man with potential to fill that role was Queens rapper Nas, whose 1994 album Illmatic had placed him among hip-hop royalty. There had been bad blood brewing between the two rappers since 1993, when Nas rebuffed Jay-Z’s request to collaborate on a song.⁶ When Jay-Z decided to ratchet up his violent rhetoric years later, the conflict exploded into the most heated hip-hop rivalry since Tupac and Biggie’s feud.

Jay-Z launched his opening salvo at New York’s Summer Jam concert in June 2001 with the song “Takeover.” The track was initially a response to insults hurled by Mobb Deep, a Queens-based group with ties to Nas, and featured choice words such as “I don’t care if you Mobb Deep, I hold triggers to crews / You little fuck, I got money stacks bigger than you.” Jay-Z bragged about selling drugs in the late 1980s while Mobb Deep member Prodigy was attending dance school—and flashed pictures of the rapper as a child wearing a leotard on the arena’s JumboTron. With the last line of his verse, he took the challenge directly to his biggest rival: “Ask Nas, he don’t want it with [Jay-Z]—no!”⁷

With that, the war was on. “It was no holds barred, the best pound-for-pound emcee battle of all time,” says Serch, who served as an executive producer for Nas and helped bring him mainstream recognition in the mid-1990s. After “Takeover” came out, Nas responded with a radio freestyle accusing Jay-Z of being a phony (“the rap version of Sisqó,” a one-hit-wonder singer) and calling into question the validity of his drug-dealing claims (“Bore me with your fake coke rhymes / And those times, they never took place, you liar”).⁸

Jay-Z fired back in September with the release of his new album, The Blueprint, which featured “Takeover” with an extra verse attacking Nas. Choice barbs included “Had a spark when you started but now you’re just garbage / Fell from top ten to not mentioned at all” and “Your lame career has come to an end, there’s only so long fake thugs can pretend / You ain’t live it, you witnessed it from your folks’ pad, you scribbled in your notepad and created your life.” But the kicker came at the end of the verse, where Jay-Z alluded to an affair he had with Nas’s former girlfriend, Carmen Bryan, by saying, “You-know-who did you-know-what with you-know-who / Yeah, just keep that between me and you.”⁹

The gauntlet thrown, Nas responded with the devastating track “Ether” on his new album, Stillmatic. In the song, Nas called Jay-Z “a fan, a phony, a fake” and accused him of riding Biggie’s coattails, asking, “How much of Biggie’s rhymes is gonna come out your fat lips?” The song also contained a slew of homophobic lyrics deriding “Gay-Z and Cock-A-Fella Records.”¹⁰ The track spurred Jay-Z to follow up with a freestyle radio response focusing on his sexual relationship with Carmen Bryan, spelling out details so salacious that when Jay-Z’s own mother heard the recording, she called her son and demanded that he apologize to Nas’s family, which he did.

Fueled by the feud, Jay-Z’s music was selling faster than ever; his new album achieved platinum status barely a month after its release. “What really became interesting about that battle is how Jay used it to create more popularity for his music and less popularity for the battle, and I think it was a very smart business move on Jay’s part,” says Serch. “Jay used that opportunity to just put out great record after great record, and got with some of the hottest producers, and knew that every DJ in the country was spinning his records, and used that to propel everything he had in his catalog at the time.”

In his duel with Nas, Jay-Z had managed to create a microcosm of the West Coast-East Coast drama of the previous decade. But this war was between rappers on different sides of the same city, and, more important, it never escalated into the sort of violence that the Tupac-Biggie battle did. Whether that was an indication that Jay-Z simply fanned the feud’s flames to sell more records or just an acknowledgment that he and Nas were more restrained in their dealings is uncertain. Chang believes Jay-Z engineered the clash to keep himself relevant on the street and to satisfy the hardcore fan base that he risked alienating with some of the more poppy songs he’d been putting out around that time.

“You [can] read it as him trying to take care of the core audience,” says Chang. “[Jay-Z and Nas] are sort of battling for the crown that Biggie left behind. There’s all the imagery that’s sitting there waiting for a journalist to sculpt it into the new battle royale, and for everybody to make money off of that. It extended both of their careers quite a bit.”¹¹

In 2005, after the conflict had cooled, Jay-Z announced a handful of upcoming live shows with the ominous moniker “I Declare War.” It seemed that Jay-Z was poised to reignite his battle with Nas. His first show in the series took place at New Jersey’s Continental Airlines Arena and contained all the trappings of a military declaration. The stage was laid out to look like the Oval Office, complete with presidential seal and red phone. Two hours into the show, Jay-Z was in the midst of a song from his second album called “Where I’m From.” He delivered the line “I’m from where niggas pull your card / And argue all day about who’s the best MC: Biggie, Jay-Z, or Nas,” and then the music stopped abruptly.

“This was called I Declare War,” Jay-Z said, addressing the audience. “It’s bigger than I declare war. It’s like the motherfuckin’ president presents the United Nations. So you know what I did for hip-hop? I said, ‘Fuck that shit.’ Let’s go, [Nas]!” With that, a man in a military jacket hopped onto the stage, none other than Jay-Z’s archrival. The two stars unleashed a furious rendition of Jay-Z’s song “Dead Presidents,” which samples one of Nas’s songs, then shook hands in front of the ecstatic crowd.¹²

“People can’t tell you where they were when their kid was born,” says Serch. “But they could tell you where they were when Nas hit that stage. That was a historic moment in hip-hop. Because no other hip-hop battle ended amicably while both artists were still on top.”

Ever the trendsetter, Jay-Z was able to bring about reconciliation between two warring camps, something that had never been done on that scale in rap. Just as conflict sold records in the old days, Jay-Z believed that high-profile peacemaking was the way of the future. His plan to monetize it would be revealed later; in the meantime, he merely hinted at it as he stood with Nas in front of twenty thousand screaming fans.

Signaled by the resolution of his battle with Nas, Jay-Z’s career was entering a new phase. This was a period that would be characterized not by spats, coastal or local, but by placing himself, both lyrically and physically, in the presence of people associated with victory. Jay-Z’s early muses included John Gotti and Michael Corleone; by 2003, Jay-Z was calling himself “the black Warren Buffett.” Jay-Z gave himself the nicknames Jay-Hova, Hova, and Hov, all derived from the godly name Jehovah. There was no doubt he aimed to cement his status as hip-hop’s ultimate deity.

In that vein, Jay-Z also likened himself to another god of sorts: Michael Jordan. Whether bragging that he was “the Mike Jordan of recordin’ ” or saying, “I’m Michael Jordan, I play for the team I own,” Jay-Z drew a number of parallels to His Airness. And what better company to keep—with five MVP trophies and six championship rings (not to mention plenty of his own business acumen), Jordan is considered the greatest basketball player of all time. “[Jay] spent a lot [of] time in his career comparing himself to Michael Jordan, and not for no reason,” says Touré. “That’s what he thinks of himself as.”¹⁴

Jordan was born in Brooklyn and smoothed out his style of play over the course of his career in a way that was similar to the evolution of Jay-Z’s rap—at least according to Jay-Z. “In his early days, Jordan was rocking a cradle, cranking it, all crazy, but he wasn’t winning championships,” Jay-Z once explained to The New Yorker. “And then, later in his career, he just had a fadeaway jump shot, and they won six titles. Which was the better Jordan? I don’t know.”¹⁵

The two would prove to have even more in common beyond 2003, from retiring and un-retiring to leaving their original careers with the aim of becoming serious businessmen. But in the summer of 2003, as Jay-Z’s fame reached new heights, he would make the most Jordanesque gesture of his career.