Once he found a reputable distributor, Priority Records (and then later Def Jam), Jay-Z finally had everything in place. Together with friends Damon Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, he created Roc-a-Fella Records in 1996, a risky strategy for cutting out the middleman and making money for himself. Jay-Z subsequently decided to make an untraditional decision and start his own label rather than sign with an established label like Jaz-O had done. He also participated in the group Original Flavor for a short time. It was at this point that Carter embraced the nickname Jay-Z, which was a play on Carter’s childhood nickname of “Jazzy,” and a reference to the J/Z subway station near his Bed-Stuy home.įrom Jaz-O, he learned how to navigate the rap industry. ![]() In 1989, at age 19, he joined the rapper Jaz-O to record a song called “The Originators,” which won the pair an appearance on an episode of Yo! MTV Raps. He attended Eli Whitney High School in Brooklyn, where he was a classmate of rap legend Notorious B.I.G.Ĭarter turned to rap at a very young age as an escape from the drugs, violence and poverty that surrounded him in the Marcy Projects. He had a rough adolescence, detailed in many of his autobiographical songs. ![]() The young rapper was raised by his mother, Gloria Carter, in Brooklyn’s drug-infested Marcy Projects. ![]() One of the greatest, most successful hip-hop artists of all time, Jay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter on December 4, 1969, in Bedford Stuyvesant.Ĭarter’s father, Adnes Reeves, left the family when Carter was only 11 years old.
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