Gone were the endearing attempts at dancing alongside Jaz, looking like a kid at his own bar mitzvah being coaxed onto the floor. Composed, assured, jaded, deeply unimpressed-these were emotions he could radiate without even trying, and they were truer to his nature. First, nobody wanted to hear Jay Z excited. In that murky time between his puppyish Jaz-O beginnings and his sober and assured reappearance on Reasonable Doubt, he figured some things out. He was an impressive local kid, but no one’s idea of a worldwide star. He toured, briefly, with Big Daddy Kane, and spit some freestyles for New York hip-hop radio. He linked up with Big Jaz (later Jaz-O), doing a stint as the older man's baby-faced sidekick and kicking the triplet-time “figgity-figgity”-style flows that were sweeping New York at the time. At this point, by his own cold-eyed accounting on the song “Politics As Usual,” he had been selling drugs for “10 years.” Along a parallel track, he had been flirting furtively with being a rapper. In Jay’s mind at least, the album certainly marked the end of an era. He announced the album with a statement that he was retiring and henceforth “would only be about the business.” In some alternate universe, that might’ve been it. The smaller but more influential world of hardcore rap intelligentsia paid attention to him, but in the shadow of Biggie and Pac, Jay felt like a lesser myth. The Source gave it 4 out of 5 mics-approving, not rapturous. Critics were impressed, but not overly so: Mainstream and non-hip-hop publications noted it was clever at times but mostly a rehash of Scarface and gangster-movie tropes. “Ain’t No Nigga” was a hit, for sure, and the album was certified Gold on its release solid, but hardly world-conquering in the dynastic era CD sales. Perhaps he’s never forgotten its relatively inauspicious release. He has curated its legacy so assiduously that Reasonable Doubt seems like the one part of his story about which he remains insecure, the piece of his legacy that might blink out if he didn’t take care of it.
#JAY Z REASONABLE DOUBT WHOLE CREW GOT BREAD SERIES#
He’s thrown it a series of lavish birthday parties, celebrating its 10th anniversary with a full-concert performance in 2006 and commissioning a documentary to air only on his TIDAL streaming service for its 20th. He keeps yanking it from streaming services, as if the album is a troubled prep-school kid. Shawn Carter has always been fiercely protective of his first full-length, to the degree that it sometimes feels like it belongs more to him than to us. It was the valedictory statement of a drug kingpin and the commencement of a brand, a lifetime’s worth of private thoughts discharged before the true business of empire-building could begin. Every contributor was paid in bags of cash, piles so mountainous nobody involved could be mistaken how they were acquired. It was the album he made before the world was listening, with only a close crew of friends and associates at the late age of 26. So goes the story of Reasonable Doubt, anyway, a tale Jay Z has regaled us with at every opportunity since its release on a new and unproven independent label called Roc-A-Fella Records. Then they became humungous and the whole direction of hip-hop changed after that.He was only going to make one album. Jay Z and Biggie, they made some compromises to their music in my estimation by starting to use R&B samples knowing that would help them get more radio play and reach a broader audience. “Everybody was just trying to be exposed and be heard on their terms but not everyone. “Everybody was in the same pool in that regard,” Garcia explains. However, while the likes of Jay Z and Biggie came from the heart of the street, the sound and style of Reasonable Doubt was in stark contrast to the scene developing even deeper underground in 1996 with the buzz coming from the likes of such acts as Company Flow, The Juggaknots and Mad Skillz, all of whom got their first shine on the Stretch and Bobbito Show as well. “Dissed and feared by teachers and parents and neighbors and cops, broke, working on a corner to try and get some bread for basic shit-as more than some glamorous alternative to a real job. “I loved that he described what a lot of hustlers were going through in the streets,” he professes in Decoded regarding listening to Biggie’s 1994 indelible debut Ready to Die.
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