Podcast #50: Jay-Z on Hustling and Forgiveness

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
February 26, 2015

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We are hugely proud this week to bring you the 50th episode of the New York Public Library podcast. Over the last forty-nine episodes, we've learned and laughed a lot with our incredible guests. Visual artist Kara Walker spoke with Jad Abumrad about her breathtaking work "A Subtlety" at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Joan Didion shared the key to her revision: a cocktail. Wes Anderson discussed finding inspiration in the work of Stefan Zweig and Francoise Truffaut. And, the wonderful Toni Morrison explained to Junot Diaz why she tells her writing students, "You don't know nothing."
For our 50th episode, we're proud to present rap icon Jay-Z, a.k.a. Mr. Shawn Carter, in conversation with the brilliant Cornel West and Paul Holdengräber. Jay-Z has won 19 Grammy Awards, released albums numbering in the double digits, founded his own record label and fashion line, and opened a nightclub. In 2010, he published a wonderful memoir-cum-lyrical deconstruction, Decoded. He spoke at Live from the NYPL about growing up in the Marcy Projects, hustling, and forgiveness.

Jay Z

Those familiar with the song "Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)" will know that Jay-Z raps, "Marcy raised me, and whether right or wrong, streets gave me all I write in the song." So how exactly did Marcy raise the rapper?

"I was born in Marcy Projects, you know," he explained, "the opportunities that were afforded us there were very few. And we didn’t have—even the people that made it out of there, we didn’t have role models who would come back and speak to us and say, 'Man, this is how you do it, and you have to have this sort of thing.' The people that were speaking to us was the hustlers—they were the only ones who had a conversation with us on how to be men and how to be—have integrity and honesty and loyalty. That’s what I mean it’s complex—how complex human beings can be. Here’s a guy who’s basically selling destruction to his whole neighborhood, but he’s telling you, you know, he’s giving you things that help you become a man, so he’s feeding new life at the same time he’s destroying life."

Jay-Z elaborated on his complex stance towards hustlers in response to West's questions regarding how hustling might be related to resisting oppressive power structures:

"I think the hustler and the freedom fighter are similar in, you know, it’s this anti-countercultural movement. One is about freedom and about having things and about improving your position, and then at some point it gets lost in that translation, and it becomes about greed, and it becomes about adrenaline and it becomes about the excitement—the excitement of getting away with something that you’re not supposed to—I mean, if we’re being honest about it, you know, at some point the excitement of getting away with it, the excitement of driving fancy cars and things. And you know, that level, so the difference to me between a hustler and a freedom fighter is a level of maturity."

Jay Z, Paul Holdengraber, Cornel West

Maturity became a theme of the conversation, and discussing his personal growth, Mr. Carter told the story of meeting his father, who left the family when his son was around eleven or twelve. The experience, he said, is one he wishes he could bestow on all children estranged from their parents:

"As a gift I would love for our generation and all the people that grew up without their parents, whether you knew them early on or not is to have that conversation so you could let that sort of anger go, because that’s the sort of anger that keeps you from love, right, it makes you put up walls and you don’t let people get close to you, because you don’t ever want to feel that feeling of abandonment or that feeling of hurt again... You know, growing up I just thought that he decided one day that he was tired of everything and walked out, and I didn’t know the emotional circumstances behind what happened. So what happened when I was about eleven was his younger brother, whose name was Ray had got stabbed up in Sumner Projects, which is about fifteen minutes away from where we lived, and he died, and my father would go out at nights and look for the guy who killed him, and my mother would say, 'man, you have a family here, how can you go out and risk, you know, these sort of, you know, risk your family—your family is here,' and he’s like, 'no, that’s my brother,' so that dynamic of 'my blood brother versus my family,' you know, which should have been one thing, but it was like a pull to him and then he really got depressed and started drinking and doing drugs and this and that, and then he just wasn’t the same person who had been there for the first ten years of my life, and who had married my mom at a time when it wasn’t popular, you know, and who was raising, you know, the four of us as a man, you know, something happened to him, So without that context, just him leaving, I had this anger, you know,but when I slowly got to know why I could understand a bit of what happened to him. He was sick, he wasn’t who he used to be, he had changed as a person, he had been scarred, and he built up this wall that he couldn’t get over, and then, you know, drugs made him go further away from his true self."

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