 
|
|
|
Page 1
|
|
|
Just when things were going great, Jay gets caught up in a tragedy, a beef and a scandal ...
|
|
|
Page 2
|
|
|
Jay still has love for R. Kelly but doesn't want to be nosy, Scarface gets intimidated, and Jigga and Beyoncé need an 'event' ...
|
|
|
Page 3
|
|
|
Jay's beef with Tupac, his dealings with Suge, and is he or isn't he with Beyoncé? ... ...
|
|
|
Jay-Z Photo Album
|
|
|
Take a look at highlights throughout Hova's career
|
|
|
Jay-Z: What More Can I Say
|
|
|
|
|
Browse Bands by Name
|
|
Or enter a band name below to search:
|
 Bands Main
|
|
|
|
|
|
-- by Shaheem Reid, with additional reporting by Sway Calloway
If you didn't have a global phone, you weren't getting in contact with Jay-Z. And if you were lucky enough to catch up with Young Hova, you weren't going to talk his head off. The Jiggaman had left behind the Bentley coupes to fly away for his first vacation "ever."
He took half the summer off to travel through Europe, along the way mingling with music A-listers (he had drinks with Quincy Jones, recorded with Mariah Carey and went to Bono's house for lunch). He rubbed shoulders with sports royalty (he just had to go to Wimbledon to see his buddies the Williams sisters play in the finals) and politicked with official bluebloods in St. Tropez, the kind of people who have no problem going to the club and buying a $20,000 bottle of Magnum Cristal that's as tall as a five-year-old child. Jay-Z just chilled.
If anybody needed some time off, it was Jay. His November 12 release, the double LP The Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse, is his seventh album since 1999 — a two-every 365-days pace that even the late Tupac would have been proud of — and Jay recorded 40 tracks for the set in about a month's time. In addition to that, Jay's been riding on a professional and personal roller coaster, and these ups and downs had exhausted him.
"I just believe everything happens for a reason," Hovi explained while sitting in front of a fireplace in New York's Giraffe hotel, a few weeks after his jaunt around the world. He was pondering his highs and lows. "I don't sit and say, 'Why did this happen?' My energy and focus is to make sure it don't happen again. My saying is, 'It is what it is.' If people just left me alone I would probably be in trouble. The more controversy, the more things I got to say, and the better I will be."
In June 2001 it seemed that things couldn't get any better. Jay was at his most triumphant point, pulling off one of the most memorable hip-hop performances of all time at New York radio station Hot 97's Summer Jam concert. ("I told Mike, people never seen you," he remembered about asking special guest Michael Jackson to come out onstage with him. "People never saw you at the laundromat, people never saw you at the store, people never saw you, and they love you.") But then later that summer, his close friend Aaliyah died in a plane crash. Following that nadir, he completed one of the best-received LPs of his career, The Blueprint, and fought off bootlegging only to drop the album on September 11 amidst a terrorist strike on the U.S. But not even the Taliban deterred Jay's fans from going to the stores and copping his album: He debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart the following week. Later, however, in the midst of a successful tour, Jay's battle with Nas came to a boiling point, with Jigga ultimately coming out on the losing end (so said the streets).
And the constant ebb and flow of Jigga's fortune doesn't stop there. In October of 2001, the courts said that Jay had to serve three years of probation after he pleaded guilty to stabbing Lance "Un" Rivera. However, Jigga did dodge a gun possession charge earlier that month. Far from being shell-shocked, Jay completed yet another LP by the beginning of 2002, this time the much-hyped collaboration with R. Kelly, The Best of Both Worlds, only to have the plans for the album fizzle in the wake of Kelly's sex scandal.
|
|
|
|
Photo: Roc-A-Fella
|
|
|
|
|
