Jay-Z: How I went from rags to riches

Jay-Z remembers the first time he heard someone rap. He was a kid walking through the Marcy Houses in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where he grew up, and he stumbled on a circle of kids. When he peeked inside, he saw an older kid he hardly knew, acting like ladies in church touched “by the spirit” — rhyming couplets, as if possessed. It went on for more than half an hour and the young Jay-Z, a k a Shawn Carter, was entranced.

The young boy thought it was cool. His next thought: “I could do that,” he writes in his new book “Decoder,” an autobiography out Nov. 16 that interprets lyrics to 36 of his songs. The book is being released with a bang, with one of the most unusual marketing campaigns in recent memory. As part of the campaign, Jay-Z is releasing every single page to the public before the book hits store on November 16.

He addresses his past, including allegations of drug selling, stabbings, and life as a hustler during the crack-ravaged 80s. The book also deals with Jay-Z’s fractious relationships with assorted rap stars, including MC Hammer.

In the book he recounts being inspired by his mother, Gloria, who bought him a three-ring binder. He began to carry it everywhere, scribbling down rhymes about the things he saw and heard. Every night, he’d hide the notebook under his bed — to make sure no one ripped off his words. He read dictionaries in his spare time to increase his vocabulary, and before he was high school age he was taking part in rap battles in the Marcy projects, hoping to become known as “the best poet on the block.”

Jay-Z lived with his mother, a clerk at an investment firm, his father, Adnis Reeves, two older sisters and an older brother in apartment 5C in the Marcy Houses.

When Jay-Z was 11, his father left home for good. Soon after, the young boy — who was a good student at he various high schools he attended in Brooklyn, despite rarely studying — would drop out and start dealing crack.

Now, at 41, he’s one half of the richest entertainment couple in the world, along with his wife, Beyoncé, according to Forbes. The pair earned $122 million last year alone and Jay-Z’s total worth was $450 million in 2010. He’s had more No. 1 albums than Elvis, with 11 albums to his name and 10 Grammy awards. In “Decoder,” he writes for the first time how his training as a crack dealer and hustler helped him understand business and turned him into an artist telling the story of the street in rhyme.

* Crack Comes to Town

Although he was starting to find his voice as a rapper, young Shawn didn’t have a story yet. But all that changed when crack hit the inner city. His neighbors became crackheads before his eyes. And Jay-Z started dealing to them.

“Authority was turned upside down,” he writes. Kids his age began selling crack to pay their mothers’ electric bills. They were armed with automatic weapons. Jay-Z started hustling crack at 13, and eventually would have his own crew in Trenton, NJ, and later in Maryland. He was still writing rhymes, but he made his living slinging crack. And he would spend the rest of his life writing about the more than 13 years he spent dealing drugs.

* His First Arrest

Jay-Z’s first arrest came at age 16. He was dealing in Trenton, because his friend “Hill” had a supplier there. Hill had enrolled in the local high school, and one day when Jay-Z went to meet him, he got caught with crack in his pockets on the campus. Since he had no prior arrests, the police let him go, but they confiscated his supply. In order to make up the cash to the supplier, Jay-Z had to go back to Marcy and deal crack 60 hours straight — three days in a row, he writes. He kept awake by “eating cookies and writing rhymes on the back of brown paper bags.”

* Getting Away With It

Soon Jay-Z was onto bigger deals. He and his crew traveled up and down the East Coast, sourcing and unloading drugs. Jay-Z recounts the time, in 1994, when he was driving down I-95. He had a stash of crack in a fake compartment in the sunroof of his Maxima when he got pulled over by cops for “no good reason.” The police knew they couldn’t search his car without probable cause, so they called the K-9 unit — the dogs would be able to sniff out the drugs. But the unit didn’t show up, and the cops had to let him go. A minute later, he saw the K-9 unit speeding down the highway in the other direction, but too late — he was already home free. It’s a moment he would later recount in his 2004 hit song, “99 Problems” with the lyric: “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.” At the time, Jay-Z was slammed for the misogynistic use of the word “bitch” — but, as he reveals in his book, he was actually referring to a female dog, or the dogs that never caught up to him that day. “It would have changed my life if that dog had been a few seconds faster,” he writes.

* Almost Famous

Even though he was still dealing drugs, whenever Jay-Z came back to New York he met with his friend Jaz, another rhymer, and the two would lock themselves in a room “with a pen, a pad, and some Apple Jacks and Haagen Dazs.” Jaz got a record deal with EMI in 1989, and Jay-Z took note when the record company dropped his friend after his single flopped. “I thought to myself, ‘This business sucks.’ No honor, no integrity; it was disgusting. In some ways it was worse than the streets.” Jay-Z learned from that experience and started his own label, Roc-a-fella, in 1994, with Damon Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke.

* His First Hit

When Jay-Z recorded the song “Hard Knock Life” in 1998 — which made him a breakout star — he borrowed from the story of Little Orphan Annie. He said he found a “mirror” between his life and that of Annie’s. “The song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reality.” But first, he had to get clearance from the “Annie” franchise to use the “Hard Knock Life” chorus in his anthem. Initially, he was turned down. So he wrote the company a letter, making up a tale about how, when he was in the seventh grade, his teacher held an essay contest. The prize: A trip to the city to see “Annie.” This was, he writes, “A lie. I wrote that

. . . I felt like I understood honey’s story.” The company believed Jay-Z’s tale and cleared the rights to what became his first mega-hit.

* Dealing with Success

Jay-Z writes about the danger hip-hop stars face — mostly at the hands of other hip-hop artists — when they become famous. Of close friend the Notorious B.I.G., who, along with Tupac Shakur, who were shot and killed at their peak, he says: “They were both perfectly safe before they started rapping; they weren’t being hunted by killers until they got into music. Biggie was on the streets before he started releasing music, but he never had squads of shooters (or the Feds) coming after him until he was famous.”

He recalls meeting with Eminem in the studio in 2003 to record “Moment of Clarity” for Jay-Z’s “Black Album.” When Jay-Z went to hug his friend, he realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest. At the time, Eminem had three multiplatinum albums and a No. 1 film, “8 Mile.” Jay-Z believed Eminem should have been “on a boat somewhere” without the worry of being shot or attacked by an enemy from the underworld of rap.

* Cristal Diss

Biggie first introduced Jay-Z, who says he rarely takes drugs, to Cristal Champagne in 1994. Since then, he and other hip-hop stars put the expensive drink on the map by name-checking it in their rhymes. So when Cristal’s managing director, Frederic Rouzad, was asked by a reporter if the brand was compromised by the “association with the ‘bling lifestyle’,” and he replied, “We can’t forbid people from buying it,” Jay-Z decided to boycott the brand altogether. “That was a slap in the face,” Jay-Z writes. “I released a statement saying that I would never drink Cristal or promote it in any way or serve it at any of my clubs ever again. I felt like this was the kind of bull – – – t I’d been dealing with forever, this kind of patronizing disrespect for the culture of hip-hop.”

* The Lance Rivera incident

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.”

* Coming to Terms With Dad

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.”

* Getting High with Biggie

Biggie made a cameo appearance in the 1996 video for “Ain’t no N – – – a,” which Jay-Z was filming with Foxy Brown in Miami just when he started to break. Jay-Z says he looked down on smoking pot as counterproductive, and only did so on vacation. “I could count the number of times I’d smoked trees,” he writes. But when Big asked him to smoke, he said to himself, “Relax, you’re not on the streets anymore.” So he smoked, and got stoned out of his mind just before the video started shooting. Laughing at his formerly sober friend, Biggie leaned in and whispered in Jay-Z’s ear: “I got ya.” It took Jay-Z 20 minutes in his room to gather his wits. Later he told his friend: “Never again my n – – – a.”

* Meeting Oprah

Jay-Z first met Oprah Winfrey at a dinner party. Winfrey disavows hip-hop for its violence, but the two got to talking and it came up that Jay-Z had read “The Seat of the Soul,” “a book that really affected the way I think about life,” he writes. Oprah had also read the book, which is about the power of positive thinking. The book’s author, Gary Zukav, had been a guest on her show a few times. “Oprah expressed surprise that I also was a fan of his work. She didn’t expect that of a rapper,” he writes.

* Befriending Obama

A friend of President Obama’s helped set up a meeting with Jay-Z in 2008, he says. The two talked for hours. “I wish I could remember a specific moment when it hit me that this guy was special. But it wasn’t like that,” he writes. “It was the fact that he sought me out and then asked question after question about music, about where I’m from, about what people in my circle — the wider circle that reaches . . . all the way back to Marcy — were thinking about politically.”

When Beyoncé sang at the inauguration, he writes, he watched from the audience instead of backstage so he could “feel the energy of everyday people. It was unbelievable to see us — me, Beyoncé, Puff, and other people I’ve known for so long — sharing in this rite of passage.”