Jay Z: Success against the odds

There are few rags to riches stories which match the journey of Jay Z aka Shawn Corey Knowles Carter. Today he stands on top of the world as a global Hip Hop mogul, entrepreneur and one-half the music power couple with his superstar wife, Beyonce. Then as now, Jay Z has always seen himself first and foremost a businessman and entrepreneur.

However, it could have been all so different. Selling cocaine and crack cocaine in and around the ‘Projects’ –poor housing tenements –in Brooklyn, Carter, has he was known then came face to face with his own mortality. A rival dealer shot him at close range. Fortunately all three bullets missed. It wasn’t the only time that violence consumed this young mans life. He shot and wounded his older drug addicted brother who stole from him, and stabbed a business associate who was bootlegging his early albums.

The American dream circumvented the trouble ridden housing ‘Projects’ where Carter's mother tried to raise her sons the best she could on her own. To sample the riches of the American dream, Jay Z like many others acutely understood that violence and being street savvy were prerequisites, as long, that is, you survived to the tell the tale.

But it was his love of music and his gift for spinning rhyming couplets, faster, more furiously than any of his peers which would be his ticket to stardom. Moreover, making sense of, and articulating the life that he had lived, gave him the raw material that would take a niche sound to global music domination.

Corporate America may not have seen the potential in Jay Z or any of his peers from the ‘projects’, but young white America couldn’t get enough of the energy, sound and sheer coolness of Hip Hop. It true though, the global phenomena of Hip Hop has had its unintended consequences. Not least the the glorification of misogyny-hoes and bitches-; the glamourising of gangster rap; and the use of the N word. All have demeaned the African American. It’s interesting too that since have a daughter Jay Z has abruptly stopped the gender insults.

But on a business level, you have to hand it to guys such as Jay Z, P Diddy and Dr Dre. The difference between them, for example, and Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder, was that unlike the Motown heroes, from very early on the Rappers owned their record companies. In Jay Z’s case Def Jam records, then he owned his clothing company Roca wear, and now he part owns his beloved baseball team The New York jets.

Whatever Jay Z has done in business he has carried with him a mental or physical spreadsheet to see where the profits are.

The Jay Z story may not come from the American dream, but it has all the ingredients for a Hollywood Blockbuster. For me, however, a more interesting question might be: for the health and wealth of our society how do we give those young men and women from the ‘Projects’ or from our own rough-tough, housing estates, a chance to turn their energy and savvyness into a pathway of opportunities?

It would be easy to be dogmatic and say ‘damn them, why should we be giving criminals or would-be criminals help and support?’ My answer would be because we all benefit from offering them a lifestyle away from criminality and violence. Secondly, as a society, we must take some responsibility in regards to not offering them kaleidoscope of opportunities in the first place.

Above all, however, the Jay Z story tells us that given the right opportunities the kid from the Bronx innately has the same potential as the kid from the super privileged Prep school to change both, theirs and our world.

Simon Woolley