![]() Reasonable Doubt sold 420,000 copies in its first year. ![]() They started by selling Reasonable Doubt out of the trunks of their cars, going anywhere to sell the album, even barbershops. Undeterred, Dash decided he and Jay would start their own label, Rock-A-Fella Records and sell the album themselves. Soon after partnering up, Jay and Dash tried selling Jay-Z’s legendary first album, Reasonable Doubt, to record labels, but they were met with a series of rejections. But upon meeting Jay, he knew he had the goods. Dash was skeptical of the rumors about Jay-Z’s talent at first, unable to fathom there was a rapper that good from Brooklyn. Dash was from Harlem and a hustler in his own right as a club promoter. Jay’s third and most fruitful mentorship was with Damon Dash. Later he would persuade rapper Big Daddy Kane to let him travel on his tour bus, earning his spot by rapping during intermissions at his shows that featured artists like Queen Latifah and Tupac Shakur. While selling cocaine he developed his penchant for profits, eventually expanding their operations to Maryland and Virginia where there was more room to breathe away from New York. Jay-Z then partnered with his high school classmate and fellow dropout DeHaven Irby to learn the drug game in Trenton, New Jersey. Jaz-O helped Jay-Z improve his rap skills, teaching him not to practice on his craft on the corner, so that when he would spit in the streets or a club people would wonder how he made it look so easy. It’s true that Jay-Z possessed both of those in spades, but he was also humble and savvy enough to recognize when he crossed paths with someone he could learn from to reach his final destination.įirst, it was Jonathan “Jaz-O” Burks, an older rapper from Marcy who recognized himself in the young, hungry rapper. With origin stories like this we often attribute outliers to God-given talent or an unceasing drive for success. ![]() His father flew the coop when he was 10, and Jay-Z was largely left to fend for himself. Jay-Z was raised by a single mother in the Marcy Projects of Brooklyn. Please…get a life people, it’s all abstract.“I’m a hustler baby, I sell water to a well.” - Jay-Z Jay’s not illumanati, Sam Brown is….right? I was also trying to contradict the excess of hip-hop videos by making something brutally simple and claustrophobic.” All the imagery was thought up by me and was a response to the track itself.įor those interested, the idea is actually about a funeral for old imagery and ideas, hence all the gothic and oppressive stuff. “He gave me a very loose brief, and made it clear that we should be progressive with the video. He also added to Vibe that while Jay gave him a “loose brief” of the concept for the video, ultimately the idea for the video was his. You can connect anything if you try hard enough, and make it mean anything you want it to.” None of it is owned by any one culture or belief system. There is imagery in this video that is drawn from all over the place. One of the great things about music videos are they can be enjoyed purely visually-it doesn’t need to mean anything or make any sense…. They don’t always want or need things to be spelt out for them. However, I’ve always felt that the viewing public was, in general, extremely visually literate. “I think when you’re dealing in abstract imagery people are going to want to draw lines between things and make sense of it. Now for the first time the director of the video Sam Brown is speaking out to defend his work.īrown spoke in an interview with Vibe on his product saying that the “visually illiterate” public got it all wrong, there are no ties with the video to any culture or belief system.
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