Probably the rapper chose his stage moniker, having combined these two letters. In his region there were two train routes, J and Z. Jay Z was brought up in Marcy Projects (New York), where he flirted with drugs and physical violence. Gloria Carter worked as a bank clerk and she tried her best to provide her children for food and cheap clothes.

“For me it was the end of our friendship”, Jay used to tell later. When the boy was 12, he suffered from his father leaving their family. He is the youngest of four children in the family of Gloria Carter and Adness Reeves. 1.The early life of “special” Shawn Corey Carter was quite complicated. It’s a still a stunning, bold piece of work, utterly unlike anything his peers were making. Yeezus (2013)įorty minutes of abrasive, distorted hostility that drags everything from bovver-booted glam to industrial music to acid house into the mix, Yeezus is faintly marred by the feeling that West’s no-filter approach to lyrics is getting disturbingly out of control. The orchestral arrangements of Jon Brion add a new weight and depth to West’s sound, the hits – Touch the Sky, Gold Digger – are among his most impermeable, and there’s the unmistakable sense of an artist keen to reach beyond the usual confines of his genre. Late Registration (2005)Ĭollege Dropout has better lyrics, but Late Registration just edges it in musical terms. The sugar rush of his then-signature production quirk – old soul samples sped up to chipmunk squeakiness – matched by lyrics that already hinted at the complex, ambiguous figure behind the elephantine ego. The College Dropout (2004)Īs striking a debut album as 2000s hip-hop produced, the endlessly delayed and tampered-with College Dropout was almost as good as West claimed it was. Forget Chris Martin’s ill-judged cameo and luxuriate instead in the euphoric Good Life and the Daft Punk-sampling Stronger. The least appealing of his opening trilogy of albums – the superstar narcissism tending to the-paparazzi-are-worse-than-Nazis idiocy, the sound a little too calculated in its lunge for stadium-filling vastness – but still frequently fantastic. The Life of Pablo (2016)Īt turns infuriating, superb, utterly original and deeply flawed – occasionally over the course of the same track – The Life of Pablo is a rambling mess, liberally splattered with moments of greatness ( Famous, Waves and Fade) and haunted by the sense that its failings might be less down to hubris than the fact you are listening to a mind unravelling. But some of the music boasts the same ambition as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and the lyrics occasionally flame, as on New Day and Made in America. West hooking up with Jay-Z was perhaps less about music than a super-sized, follow-that event, and there are moments when listening to the pair discuss how rich they are starts to pall. Kanye West and Jay-Z perform at the Verizon Center in Washington DC.

Jay z albums 2008