A Los Angeles man is suing Jay-Z for invasion of privacy and infringement of intellectual property based on claims that the rapper's 2010 book Decoded contains portions of a book he was working on in 2009.
"A world with amnesia won't forget your name" - Jay-Z (The City Is Mine) The big homie Jay-Z decodes the above line from "The City Is Mine" off of the In My Lifetime, Vol.1 album and why that line or "vow" as he calls it led...
Here is Jigga man himself talking about how his style of rapping has evolved over the years. Jay refers to his musical evolution and talks of some the events that shaped it and his younger days in Marcy Projects, in the video which also features on Jay-Z's official Decoded iPhone app. [Make that money Jay!]
Decoded co-author dream hampton talks to PBS Need to Know’s Jackeline Pou about her friendship with Jay-Z, hearing Jay talk about hip hop introspectively and analytically as he did for Decoded, the process making the book and her professional journey. ...
Jay-Z and Versetti holding first Decoded page
The marketing campaign for Decoded has been just as (if not more so) interesting and captivating to me as the release of the book itself. Bing and Jay-Z teamed up to create a multi-layered, interactive experience which married the virtual world with real life. Audiences had to go on a treasure hunt to find pages of the book, and then decode them. SoulCulture's creative director Versetti found the first pages in Brooklyn, but pages have been found in random locations, from Gucci jackets, to snooker balls, to dinner tables in key cities around the world. Here are some of my favourite.
The evening before Jay-Z's internationally anticipated new book, Decoded co-written by Dream Hampton, the iconic emcee engages in a talk at the New York Public Library hosted by noted author/professor Cornel West and the library's Paul Holdengräber. Kicking off at 7pm ET, you can watch the...
The song “Moment of Clarity” deals with the abandonment by his father when Jay-Z was 11. He says he realized only later that his father, Adnis Reeves, began to unravel after his brother, Jay-Z’s Uncle Ray, was murdered outside a Brooklyn club and the cops never found the killer. “My dad swore revenge and became obsessed with hunting down Uncle Ray’s killer. The tragedy — compounded by the injustice — drove him crazy, sent him to the bottle, and ultimately became a factor in the unraveling of my parents’ marriage.” He only reunited with his dad, at his mother’s urging, three months before his dad died of liver disease in 2003. But he writes, “By the time he left, he’d given me a lot of what I’d need to survive.”On the Lance Rivera incident, his fear of getting jail time and it's effect on his Rocawear sales:
Jay-Z glosses over his 1999 stabbing of record producer Lance Rivera, which resulted in the rapper pleading guilty to assault and receiving three years probation. He says he was infuriated because someone had leaked a bootleg copy of “Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter” more than a month before the release date of the album. When he asked who was behind the leak, everyone kept repeating the same name: Rivera. When Jay-Z saw him at rapper Q-Tip’s album release party at the Kit Kat Klub, he confronted him. Rivera “got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club,” Jay-Z writes, “It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar . . . I was . . . in a state of shock . . . I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger.” After this, chaos ensued in the club, “That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.” He says he decided to plead guilty after watching Puff Daddy’s trial on weapons violations that same year. Puffy was acquitted, and Jay-Z says he feared the state would be harder on him after failing to convict his friend. “The hilarious thing,” he writes, “if any of this can be considered funny, is that the Rocawear bubble coat I was wearing when they paraded me in front of the cameras started flying off the shelves the last three weeks before Christmas.”Head under the jump to read Jay-Z's experiences with two of the world's most influential figures, Obama and Oprah, and watch SoulCulture's Creative Director Eddie "Versetti" Smith finding the first ever page of the book and meeting Jigga.
We were visiting New York last month covering the CMJ Festival when on Monday 18th October our very own Creative Director Eddie "Versetti" Smith randomly took himself on an Easter-egg hunt of sorts around Manhattan to find pages of Jay-Z's new book, Decoded.
Co-written by respected journalist [and former Source editor] Dream Hampton, Jay-Z's hardcover, illustrated book is set for release in the UK on November 18th, mixing first-person memoir with ‘detailed discussions of his most famous and provocative lyrics’.
Following lyric-based clues and virtual map navigation on bing.decodejay-z.com, launched that day to promote the book, Versetti found the first two pages of the book 'hidden' in full public view at locations around New York; specifically, in a Chelsea art gallery and on the side of a building at Lafayette and Bleecker St [freaking out their tech team in the process; they didn't anticipate nerdy tag-teams...].
The couple of hours spent locating Jigga's book pages in New York turned from geeky, indulgent time-wasting on a Monday afternoon to a pair of flights to Miami on Wednesday morning, to attend the Decoded media launch at the Delano hotel, meet the iconic emcee in-person - and to leave with the all-important "childrens education fund" securing signed-copy of the first pages. With a unexpected speech.
After a chat with Jay-Z about the book's co-author, Dream Hampton, music, business and the weather I followed them both, cam-in hand, as a speech ensued... [...not really the weather]
It turns out, Jay-Z doesn't like giving speeches. At all.
The long awaited memoir of the greatest rapper of all time (yeah I said it!), will finally be available for purchase on November 16th. Decoded the fully-illustrated volume decodes 36 songs from Shawn Carter's immense back catalog, offering readers a first-hand account of Jay-Z's life through...
Hip Hop legend-in-action [and seemingly the modern blueprint for every other new emcee that emerges] Jay-Z has collaborated with respected journalist and former editor of The Source, Dream Hampton, on a new book titled Decoded - set for international release this November.
Throughout its 336 pages the hardcover, illustrated book mixes first-person memoir - tracing Jigga's life from Brooklyn's Marcy Projects his now legendary status in Hip Hop and music history - with 'detailed discussions of his most famous and provocative lyrics'.
Alongside interviews with his friends, family and the rapper himself, Decoded will also explore Jay-Z's creative process.