In 1989, he joined the rapper Jaz-O-an older performer who served as a kind of mentor-to record a song called "The Originators," which won the pair an appearance on an episode of Yo! MTV Raps. As Jay-Z later remembered his childhood in one of his songs ("December 4th"), "I went to school, got good grades, could behave when I wanted/ But I had demons deep inside that would raise when confronted."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 attended Eli Whitney High School in Brooklyn, where he was a classmate of the soon-to-be-martyred rap legend Notorious B.I.G. The young rapper was raised by his mother, Gloria Carter, in Brooklyn's drug-infested Marcy Projects.ĭuring a rough adolescence, detailed in many of his autobiographical songs, Shawn Carter dealt drugs and flirted with gun violence. "He was the last of my four children," Jay-Z's mother later recalled, "the only one who didn't give me any pain when I gave birth to him, and that's how I knew he was a special child." Jay-Z's father, Adnes Reeves, left the family when Jay-Z was only 11 years old. Rapper Jay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter on December 4, 1969, in Brooklyn, New York. He wed popular singer and actress Beyoncé Knowles in 2008. After selling millions of records with his own Roc-A-Fella label, Jay-Z created his own clothing line. He used rap as an escape, and appeared on Yo! MTV Raps in 1989. "I never lost sense of who I was, not for a day, not before I had a record deal, and certainly not after."īorn Shawn Corey Carter on December 4, 1969, Jay-Z grew up in Brooklyn's drug-infested Marcy Projects.
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