Empire State of Mind

Jay-Z inherited the difficult task of revitalizing the legendary label in an era of sagging record sales and shrinking budgets. Like much of the industry, Def Jam’s payroll was stacked with relics of the 1980s. “The culture there has been institutionalized,” Jay-Z told Rolling Stone in 2010. “You had record executives there who’ve been sitting in their office for twenty years because of one act. ‘But that’s the guy who signed Mötley Crüe!’ Seriously? That was twenty-five years ago.”²

Demoralized by what he found at Def Jam, Jay-Z came close to breaking his “I will not lose, ever” vow early in his tenure as president. “I wanted to quit right away,” he said in 2005. “There was nothing fresh, there was no excitement, it was just doing the same shit over again. I said, ‘Where’s the passion? Where’s the ideas? Where’s the new shit?’ I’m used to being around entrepreneurs and we was passionate about everything. But whether this artist comes out and [sells] four hundred million or forty thousand [albums] the first week, [the average employee’s] check is the same. So you’re doing everything routine, routine, routine, and you lose the passion for it. You stop coming up with new ideas, and you start erasing the name off the marketing plan and fill it in with another name and it’s the same shit.”³

Jay-Z revved up his employees by calling for a two-day retreat at Manhattan’s Tribeca Grand Hotel. He gave a speech, then played a tape of Def Jam’s 1984 sales pitch to give his workers a reminder of the label’s fiery, independent roots. Then he went around the room and asked staffers to share their reasons for getting into the record business in the first place. “We got people to go back to that inner kid and the joy of being in the record business,” he said. “I wanted them to be alive again.”⁴

His focus on making his employees feel good about their jobs wasn’t limited to theatrics at posh hotels. Though Jay-Z’s lyrical boasts could make Donald Trump cringe—there’s a line where Jay-Z calls himself “God MC”—he proved to be a humble and introspective boss. In a spoken word interlude to one of Jay-Z’s songs, his Brooklyn buddy Biggie says, “The key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it’s your first project, know what I’m saying? Like it’s your first day like when you was an intern . . . stay humble.”⁵ Many who worked with Jay-Z at Def Jam say he embodied that philosophy, from the label’s top artists all the way down to interns like Nick Simmons, an aspiring entertainment executive who worked at Def Jam in the summer between his sophomore and junior years of college. “Jay would walk by and say, ‘Hey, how ya doing,’ ” Simmons remembers. “Sometimes he’d come over to the intern booth just to say hi.”⁶

Those who crossed paths with Jay-Z in the boardroom noticed a keen intellectual curiosity in the Def Jam president. “One of the things I like about the guy is that he wants to learn,” says Bernie Resnick, a Philadelphia-based entertainment lawyer. “He has a thirst for knowledge. And even when he was younger, he was always asking questions. If it was backstage or in a studio or a business meeting, he wasn’t afraid to say, ‘Hey, how does this work?’ Or, ‘What’s the structure of that kind of deal?’ He was always very curious about business deals. Which lends itself well to someone who would like to transition from being an artist to being a business impresario.”⁷

Jay-Z’s new boss, Antonio “L.A.” Reid, wasn’t shy about heaping praise on his star employee. “Being around Jay is inspirational to people,” he gushed to Billboard in 2006. “I don’t care if you’re a forty-year-old executive or a twenty-year-old intern—having that kind of access to that kind of wisdom, stardom, experience, and level of charm could change your life.”⁸

Though he proved to be more than capable as a schmoozer, Jay-Z’s main task as president was to beef up Def Jam’s sagging musical lineup. One of his first signings was Barbadian singer Rihanna. A multiplatinum Grammy winner today, she was a nervous seventeen-year-old when she auditioned at Def Jam’s New York offices in 2005. As soon as she sang “Pon de Replay,” which eventually became her first big hit, Jay-Z recognized her potential and signed her to a record deal the same night. “The audition definitely went well,” Rihanna recalled in 2007. “Jay-Z said, ‘There’s only two ways out. Out the door after you sign this deal, or through this window.’ And we were on the twenty-ninth floor. Very flattering.”⁹

While Rihanna went about recording her debut album, Jay-Z encountered some setbacks—both personal and professional. Over the years, he’d grown close to his nephew, Colleek Luckie; when he nearly missed Luckie’s high school graduation in 2005 because of a cab snafu, Jay-Z made a rare show of emotion (“I was so mad,” he said. “I had tears in my eyes and shit. I don’t cry over nothing.”¹⁰) Though he made it to the ceremony, devastating news came weeks later: Luckie was killed in a car accident while sitting in the passenger seat of the Chrysler that Jay-Z had given him as a graduation present. When asked about the incident in 2005, Jay-Z was noticeably shaken. “It was the toughest shit,” he said. “Nothing close to it. Like I’m numb. I’m numb.”¹¹ His nephew’s passing represented not only the loss of a bright young life, but perhaps also the interruption of Jay-Z’s attempts to deal with his own feelings of paternal abandonment by acting as a father figure to Luckie.

Back at the office, Jay-Z kept his composure in spite of the additional adversity. Albums from Marcy chum Memphis Bleek and Philadelphia-based rap duo Young Gunz produced dreary sales numbers despite heavy shilling from Jay-Z himself. So he set about signing more acts to Def Jam. The Roots, one of hip-hop’s edgiest acts, were among the new additions. Their relationship with Jay-Z dated back to 2001, when the group agreed to work as Jay-Z’s backup band on the live album MTV Unplugged: Jay-Z.

On a winter’s day too snowy for an in-person interview, the group’s drummer, Questlove, recalls that he was a bit skeptical when the Roots first hooked up with Jay-Z. Unlike the alternative Roots, Jay-Z—especially in the old days—was known for being an ultra-materialist with a penchant for rapping about guns and money. But Questlove soon discovered the man behind the image. “Jay constantly wanted to figure out how to better his situation,” he explains. “He would stay in rehearsal until very late. And he would ask a lot of questions. And he would show up on time . . . He’s the easiest artist I’ve ever worked with. He’s literally trying to better his art, which was surprisingly admirable to me. Because I just figured, ‘Oh, you’re the king of the hill, why would you even give a fuck about your art? Who cares about art when you’ve got money?’ ”¹²

Impressed with Jay-Z’s inquisitive nature, the group turned to him when they started looking for a new home in 2005, picking Def Jam over other labels and more lucrative terms. They felt lost in the shuffle at Jimmy Iovine’s Interscope Records and believed Jay-Z would be a much more attentive boss. Thanks to the tremendous respect Iovine had for Jay-Z, the Def Jam president was able to facilitate the Roots’ release from Interscope without wounding any egos. “I told Jay, ‘I wanna come to Def Jam,’ and he was like, ‘All right, cool,’ ” explains the ever-mellow Questlove. “So he asked Jimmy Iovine. And we wrote an e-mail . . . Like, ‘We just want to transfer to Def Jam, is that okay?’ And [Jimmy] said, ‘Hey, that was the most respectful release I’ve ever done.’ ”¹³

Less than a year later, the Roots found themselves in a bind that required the sort of personal attention that drew them to Def Jam in the first place. This situation was so dicey and urgent that it seemed not even Jay-Z could fix it: on the eve of finalizing their latest album, the Roots discovered they needed legal approval to use a sample from a song by the rock band Radiohead. “We had exactly twenty-four hours to get an impossible clearance,” recalls Questlove. “We were pulling our hair out because this was like the emotional centerpiece of the album, and now we’re about to lose this because the lawyers are like, ‘No, we want $700,000.’ Which was unheard of.” So Questlove called Jay-Z and explained the situation. “ ‘Please tell me you know anybody in Radiohead,’ ” he remembers telling Jay-Z. “He’s like, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ I was like, ‘Fuck, we’re going to lose this song.’ Amazingly, while I’m at the gym an hour later, [Radiohead lead singer] Thom Yorke gives us a call, and you know, it was quite the opposite. They were really flattered that we considered it, and he approved it.”

With the sample approved, the Roots’ Game Theory went on to sell sixty-one thousand copies in its first week,¹⁴ a respectable figure for a band that had always been more of an artistic act than a pop sensation. Jay-Z encouraged the group to stay true to that philosophy. “The pressure that you would think would be on us, i.e., ‘I want that radio song, don’t come in here unless you’ve got a hit,’ was the exact opposite,” remembers Questlove. “Jay was like, ‘You’d better give me the art record I expect from you guys, because I’m gonna have the whole world out to castrate me if I change their beloved Roots.’ ” Sure enough, the Roots’ album made up in critical reception what it lacked in sales. The album earned four stars out of four from USA Today, which applauded the Roots for exhibiting “a ferocity they haven’t displayed in years”;¹⁵ positive reviews also flowed in from Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, the latter of which specifically praised Jay-Z for not making the Roots “go commercial.”¹⁶

Jay-Z had other artists to lean on for raw sales, and by the end of his first summer as Def Jam’s chief, those numbers started to show. Kanye West and Young Jeezy both put out albums that went platinum with Jay-Z’s help; Rihanna’s debut sold five hundred thousand copies in six months, as did the rookie effort of rapper Rick Ross, another Jay-Z recruit, in 2006.¹⁷ Perhaps just as important as the songs released by these artists were the songs held back. When Kanye West was putting together his first album, Jay-Z implored him not to include a song called “Hey Mama,” fearing it would get lost in the shuffle of West’s debut. On his mentor’s advice, West saved the track, and it helped propel his next offering, Late Registration, to triple-platinum sales and a Grammy award for Best Rap Album.

Nurturing the careers of these artists was one of Jay-Z’s great successes during his time at Def Jam, and his peers in the executive ranks took note. “It was definitely something that you saw, his skills as an executive and his skills as a creative A&R [artists and repertoire] person,” says Craig Kallman, chief executive of Atlantic Records. “He certainly masterminded the Rihanna signing and launch and creatively spearheaded that. He oversaw Rick Ross and galvanized the company behind Rick. I think he did a great job.”¹⁸

In early 2006, Jay-Z made perhaps his boldest move by reconciling with former nemesis Nas and signing the rapper to Def Jam, banking that defusing their conflict would sell more records than fanning the flames. As noted earlier, the two performed in concert together in 2005, much to the surprise of a crowd expecting Jay-Z to ratchet up the rivalry’s rhetoric. Nas’s initial Def Jam effort, Hip-Hop Is Dead, hit stores a year later. Jay-Z appeared on the track “Black Republicans,” and the album sold an impressive 355,000 copies in its first week.¹⁹

“If you ask me to grade my performance as the president, I’d say A-plus,” Jay-Z boasted in a 2009 interview. “No one can bat 1.000. It’s impossible. I mean, everyone is looking at my shit. But if we really looked under the hood [of every record executive] and the acts they put out at the time, I’d be comparable to anyone.”²⁰

Though Jay-Z sometimes gives his audience the impression that business is more important to him than rap (“I’m just a hustler disguised as a rapper,” he claims in one song²¹), many people who’ve spent time with him believe his heart is in music. Patrick “A Kid Called Roots” Lawrence, who produced the hit song “Do My . . .” for Memphis Bleek, recalls witnessing Jay-Z’s passion firsthand in 2000.

Lawrence had been dispatched to Japan by Lyor Cohen, then-chief of Def Jam, to help start the label’s Japanese division. In the midst of Lawrence’s three-month stay in Tokyo, Jay-Z came to the city for the first time to perform a concert. When the rapper noticed Lawrence at the show, he invited him to come onstage. Lawrence obliged and couldn’t help but notice that the five thousand Japanese fans in the audience—many of whom didn’t speak English at all—knew all the words to Jay-Z’s songs. After his first set, Jay-Z took a break and let Memphis Bleek perform a few songs, including Lawrence’s “Do My . . .” Lawrence would never have expected what came next.

“Jay-Z pulls me to the edge of the stage . . . and for three minutes I perform ‘Do My . . .’ with Jay-Z and Memphis Bleek,” Lawrence recalls. “Incredible. It was like a dream. I mean, the energy. Now I see why, with all his success and his money—he claims he’s just a hustler—at the end of the day, he really has a passion for the music. He loves it, he thrives for that feeling of being on that stage and seeing what that’s like. ’Cause I really felt it right then. When I got off that stage, I was like, ‘I want to be a rap star.’ ”²²

Wanting to be a rap star again, and feeling that rush anew, was ultimately what drew Jay-Z back to the microphone in 2006. A desire to prop up sales at Def Jam, not to mention the constant desire to add funds to his own ballooning bank account, obviously contributed to Jay-Z’s decision as well. And for someone who’d stopped releasing solo albums three years earlier because he was bored with hip-hop, the opportunity to ride in on a white horse as the industry’s savior was too tempting to pass up.

His comeback album, Kingdom Come, hit stores in November 2006 and sold over two million copies in its first three weeks. “I don’t know what life will be in H-I-P-H-O-P without the boy H-O-V,” he crows at the start of the album’s title track, referencing his lordly nickname. “Not only N-Y-C, but hip-hop’s savior / So after this flow, you might owe me a favor, when Kingdom Come.”²³ Despite decent commercial success and his own blustering bravado, Jay-Z’s new album earned him some of the roughest reviews of his career, not to mention a few barbs about his age. “We never thought Jay would be flashing AARP brochures in our faces and dropping Gwyneth Paltrow’s name in a rap song,” raged Pitchfork’s Peter Macia in a review. “But that’s Kingdom Come: Jay boringly rapping about boring stuff and being totally comfortable with it.”²⁴

Perhaps because he was itching to redeem himself, perhaps because he just wanted to make another album, Jay-Z quickly followed Kingdom Come with another, grittier album in 2007. That summer, Jay-Z attended a private screening of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (coincidentally, the event was set up by his aforementioned intern, Simmons). Inspired by the film’s content—the rise and fall of 1970s Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington—Jay-Z churned out an album of the same title in a matter of weeks. Falling back from the name-dropping and soft subject matter of Kingdom Come, Jay-Z returned to the mafioso mentality that birthed his first album. That was clear from the opening line of American Gangster’s first song: “Mind state of a gangster from the forties meets the business mind of Motown’s Berry Gordy / Turn crack rock into a chain of 40/40s,” he raps, not forgetting to toss in some free advertising for his nightclubs. “America, meet the gangster Shawn Corey. Hey, young world, wanna hear a story? Close your eyes, and you could pretend you’re me.”²⁵

The rest of the album told that story. This time, the critical response was much warmer. “He packs his wordy stanzas full of unexpected syllables, clever allusions, and unpredictable rhyme schemes,” declared the New York Times. “This is probably as close as the new Jay-Z will ever come to sounding like the old Jay-Z.”²⁶ A few days later Rolling Stone proclaimed, “Forget Frank Lucas: the real black superhero here is Jay, and with American Gangster, [he’s] back.”²⁷ On the album, Jay-Z painted himself as an analog to Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas in American Gangster: clever, pragmatic, unflappable. Those who spent significant time with Jay-Z during this phase of his career tend to reinforce the comparison. “I’ve never really seen this guy sweat,” explained Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, a former Roc-A-Fella sound engineer, in 2009. “That’s a running joke that we have: he’s an alien, because I’ve never seen him sweat . . . I’ve never seen Jay super angry, or he doesn’t show it. It’s always the poker face.”²⁸

The major exception to that rule was the Lance Rivera stabbing of 1999. Jay-Z was lucky to strike a plea deal that didn’t include jail time; in Vibe’s December 2000 cover story, he called the incident a “learning experience.” Apparently it was. Weeks before American Gangster hit the stores in 2007, tracks from the album leaked. Though he was upset, Jay-Z found himself playing the role of coolheaded boss at Def Jam. “People were panicking,” recalls Simmons. “But I never heard [Jay-Z] yell or flip out or anything. He’s just an even-keel kind of guy.” Or at least, he’d learned how to be an even-keel kind of guy in the years following the Rivera incident.

Though Jay-Z attended a single therapy session (he said all the psychiatrist did was give him tea that made him sleepy),²⁹ there were a number of external factors that took some pressure off him in the years between the two leaks. There was reconciliation with his father, stability with Beyoncé, and security in his status at the top of the hip-hop world. Coupled with the effects of time and experience, the Jay-Z of 2007 was quite a different person from the Jay-Z of 1999. “I think he just grew up,” says Simmons. “He even says it in his songs: I used to be the dude wearing jerseys and stuff, but now I’m a businessman. I gotta get corporate. I gotta put on a suit and a button-up shirt.”

Jay-Z had mastered his own emotions, transforming the vengeful urges of his youth into the sort of unflappability that would prove invaluable in the boardroom. With that change—and the wealth of executive experience he’d gained at Def Jam—he found a world of new business opportunities available to him. Jay-Z’s polish and poise would eventually take him to corporate pastures even greener than Def Jam, but in the meantime, he turned his attention to something quite literally related to green pastures and fields: the champagne industry.