Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and businessperson. He is one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America having had a net worth of over $450 million in 2010. He has sold approximately 50 million albums worldwide, while receiving ten Grammy Awards for his musical work, and numerous additional nominations. Jay-Z co-owns The 40/40 Club, is part owner of the NBA's New Jersey Nets and is the creator of the clothing line Rocawear. He is the former CEO of Def Jam Recordings, one of the three founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, and the founder of Roc Nation. As an artist, he holds the record for most number one albums by a solo artist on the Billboard 200. Jay-Z also has had four number ones on the Billboard Hot 100, one as lead artist. Along with his financial and musical success, Jay-Z is known for quarreling with other artists in the rap industry, the most famous feud being between him and fellow New York rapper Nas, which was eventually settled in 2005. He married American R&B superstar Beyoncé Knowles on April 4, 2008. On December 11, 2009, Jay-Z was ranked as the 10th most successful artist of the 2000–2009 decade by Billboard Magazine and ranking as the 5th top solo male artist and as the 4th top rapper behind Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent. Source: Wikipedia.
Excerpt (Jay-Z on Bono): The writer had asked me about the U2 record that was about to be released and I said something about the kind of pressure a group like that must be under just to meet their own standard. Bono told me that my quote had really gotten to him. In fact, he said it got him a little anxious. He decided to go back to the studio even though the album was already done and keep reworking it till he thought it was as good as it could possibly be.
Excerpt (Jay-Z on assault charges): People kept giving me the same name as the source of the bootlegging. It was someone I knew, someone I never would have suspected. One night I went to Q-Tip's solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone's been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, 'No the f--- this n---a did not ... " I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.
NPR program Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured the author and book on its program in November, 2010. This is what was said on the feature story's webpage:
Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day. "It was a very intense and stressful situation," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike." Now 40, Jay-Z hasn't forgotten his past — or the lyrics he's written over the years about his childhood in the projects. In his new book, Decoded, he unpacks the detailed riffs and lyrics that make up 36 of his songs — while examining both his own life and the growth of hip-hop over the last two decades.
From The New York Times: For legions of Rolling Stones fans, Keith Richards is not only the heart and soul of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, he’s also the very avatar of rebellion: the desperado, the buccaneer, the poète maudit, the soul survivor and main offender, the torn and frayed outlaw, and the coolest dude on the planet, named both No. 1 on the rock stars most-likely-to-die list and the one life form (besides the cockroach) capable of surviving nuclear war. Halfway through his electrifying new memoir, “Life,” Keith Richards writes about the consequences of fame: the nearly complete loss of privacy and the weirdness of being mythologized by fans as a sort of folk-hero renegade. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” he says. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain. People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.” By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy. He’s decided that he’s going to tell it as he remembers it, and helped along with notebooks, letters and a diary he once kept, he remembers almost everything. [...] One of this galvanic book’s many achievements is that Mr. Richards has found a way to channel to the reader his own avidity, his own deep soul hunger for music and to make us feel the connections that bind one generation of musicians to another. Along the way he even manages to communicate something of that magic, electromagnetic experience of playing on stage with his mates, be it in a little club or a huge stadium.
"There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you[...] You’re elevated because you’re with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you’ve got wings[...] flying without a license."
From The Guardian: The survivor's story is one of the predominant narratives of our time. It usually traces a familiar arc from excess through despair to redemption, and, as such, allows us to enjoy the vicarious thrill of voyeurism within the framework of a cautionary or salutary tale. Life by Keith Richards, the most famous survivor of them all, breaks with this tradition insofar as it contains excess aplenty but hardly any despair and very little redemption. Keith did it all, had a hell of a good time, and survived to brag about it. Life has the macho swagger that rock'n'roll in general – and the Rolling Stones in particular – once possessed. This is both its strength and its weakness. It often reads like a historical document of another time: a lost world in which women were always "chicks" or "bitches", an inflatable giant penis was a non-ironic stage prop, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's was the de rigueur rock'n'roll accessory. The Keith Richards book is a drug memoir of sorts, albeit without the hardcore confessional descriptiveness of the genre. Instead, it is almost casual in its cataloguing of excess: heroin, cocaine, Tuinal, Nembutal, STP, LSD, speedballs, Moroccan hashish, Jamaican ganja, and, inevitably, methadone, are just some of the substances mentioned – often in passing. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the book, which describes his daily breakfast routine during the 70s: "I would take a barbiturate to wake up … a Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or a Quaalude… And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you're feeling mellow, you've had a bit of breakfast and you're ready for work."
"People love that image[...] They imagined me, they made me[...] Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs. They're wishing me to do things that they can't. They've got to do this job, they've got this life, they're an insurance salesman[...] but, inside them, there's a raging Keith Richards."
Keith Richards's upbringing: Keith Richards was the only child of Bert Richards and Doris Dupree Richards. He was born in Dartford, Kent. His father was a factory laborer, who was injured during World War II. Their flat on Chastilian Road was hit by a Nazi V-1 flying bomb on July 5, 1944, while he and his mother were at the hospital, visiting with Bert Richards, who'd been wounded in the Normandy invasion. Keith Richards's paternal grandparents were socialists and civic leaders. His maternal grandfather (Augustus Theodore Dupree), who toured the U.K. in a jazz big band called "Gus Dupree and His Boys," was an early influence on Richards's musical ambitions; it's this grandfather that got Richards interested in the guitar. Richards's mother introduced him to the music of Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and bought him his first guitar, a Rosetti acoustic. His father was less encouraging, telling his son to "Stop that bloody noise!" Richards's first guitar hero was Scotty Moore. Richards attended Wentworth Primary School, as did Mick Jagger. The two knew each other as schoolboys, and lived in the same neighborhood until 1954. That year, the family moved to what Keith Richards has described as "a fucking soul-destroying council estate at completely the other end of town" that looked like "a disgusting concrete jungle". The move was disorienting for the young Richards, as was his transfer a year later to Dartford Technical School (now and split into two schools named Wilmington Grammar School for Boys and Wilmington Enterprise College), which he attended from 1955 to 1959. The Dartford Tech choirmaster Jake Clair noticed Richards's singing voice and recruited him into the school choir. In a trio of boy sopranos Richards sang (amongst other performances) at Westminster Abbey in front of Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1959, Keith Richards was expelled from Dartford Technical School for truancy, and the headmaster suggested he would be more at home at the art college in the neighboring town of Sidcup. At Sidcup Art College, Richards devoted his time to playing guitar after he heard American blues artists like Little Walter and Big Bill Broonzy. He swapped a pile of records for his first electric guitar, a hollow-body Höfner cutaway.
"There was a lot of music being played at Sidcup, and we'd go into the empty classrooms and fool around with our guitars. ... Even in those days Keith could play most of [Chuck Berry's] solos. In order to stay up late with our music and still get to Sidcup in the morning, Keith and I were on a pretty steady diet of pep pills, which not only kept us awake but gave us a lift. We took all kinds of things – pills that girls took for menstruation, inhalers like Nostrilene, and other stuff. Opposite the college there was this little park with an aviary that had a cockatoo in it. Cocky the Cockatoo we used to call it. Keith used to feed it pep pills and make it stagger around on its perch. If ever we were feeling bored we'd go and give another upper to Cocky." - Dick Taylor
One morning in 1961, on the train journey from Dartford to Sidcup, Richards happened to get into the same carriage as Mick Jagger, who was then a student at the London School of Economics. They recognized each other and began talking about the LPs Jagger had with him (blues as well as R&B albums he had acquired by mail-order from America). Keith Richards was surprised and impressed that Mick Jagger not only shared his enthusiasm for Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters but also that he owned such LPs, as these were extremely rare in Britain at the time. The two discovered that they had a mutual friend in Dick Taylor, with whom Jagger was singing in an amateur band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. Jagger invited Richards to a rehearsal, and soon after, Richards also joined the line-up. The group disbanded after Jagger, Richards and Taylor met Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, with whom they went on to form The Rolling Stones (Taylor left the band in November 1962 to return to art school). By mid-1962 Richards had left Sidcup Art College in favor of pursuing his fledgling musical career and moved into a London flat with Jagger and Jones. His parents divorced at about the same time; Keith Richards maintained close ties with his mother, who was very supportive of his musical activities, but became estranged from his father and did not resume contact with him until 1982. In 1963 Richards dropped the "s" from his surname and began using the professional name "Keith Richard", because Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham felt it "looked more pop". (He used the s-less version as his pen name and stage name until the late 1970s.)
