MEMOIR...

Hi, my name is Shawn Corey Carter, also know to my fans as Jay Z, my stage name. Now at the age of 44, I am married to the world most powerful celebrity queen B also knows as  Beyonce Knowles from which I have a beautiful baby girl named Blue Ivy Carter.I am successful but not only job and money wise but family, I have succeeded in making my family happy and being there for them, financially and by my presence. Unfortunately this didn't come easy to me. As a young boy I was raised in a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. My mom brought me and siblings up alone because my father had abandoned us I wont forget the time my father shot my own brother, his own son in the shoulder at the age of 12 for stealing his jewelry. I tried to stay in school for as long as possible but in the end didn't have the honors of graduating like everyone else, instead I feel into the habit of selling crack cocaine.

Music was a passion for me. Every since I was younger I would wake up the house at night just practicing drums beats on the kitchen tables, my mum would shout at me saying: "Carter boyy, you best be stopping that noise, some people 'round here wanna sleep". Soon after I began to freestyle and writing my own lyrics and kept listening to the big artists from back in the days and soon that's how i developed the name Jazzy, everyone started calling me that which soon led them to calling me Jay-Z with a hyphen but I later declared it would be Jay Z without the hyphen, not that it would make a difference but it is now the name I am known for. As a artist i tried to aspire young teenagers to follow what they felt passionate about and do what they loved. I tried as much to represent the black community and show that we are as much capable of being successful and having great accomplishments in life. A lot of times I like to focus my songs on my community and what I have been through and what the community has been through.

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 fuck this nigga 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 indicted.

There was no reason to put my life on the line, and the lives of everyone who depends on me, because of a momentary loss of control..... I vowed to never allow myself to be in a situation like that again.

In one of my favorite songs, 99 Problems I say: "If you grew up with holes in your zapatosYou'd celebrate the minute you was having dough." After a while I started getting a lot of criticism relating my songs and talk about money. In this line i mean, if you grew up poor like me with holes in your shoes (zapatos) you'd celebrate the minute you start making money. In this song I also talk about how people take me for dumb because I came from the dirt and poverty but I'm not dumb but more like a millionaire,

This is a main part of my song:The year is '94 and in my trunk is raw
In my rear view mirror is the mother f****** law
I got two choices yall pull over the car or
bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
Now I ain't trying to see no highway chase with jake
Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case
So I...pull over to the side of the road
And I heard "Son do you know why I'm stopping you for?"
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?
"Well you was doing fifty five in a fifty four"
"License and registration and step out of the car"
"Are you carrying a weapon on you I know a lot of you are"
I ain't stepping out of sh** all my papers legit
"Do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so is the trunk and the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack are some type of lawyer or something?"
"Or somebody important or something?"
Nah I ain't passed the bar but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my sh**
"Well see how smart you are when the K-9's come"

This shows the stereotype many people including the police had set about the black people in America, that we were thieves and liars. The policeman was quick to assume I owned a weapon with me. I splashed debut in 1996 and cranked out album after album and hit after hit throughout the decade and into the next and became so successful. I am now one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America and one of the world's best-selling artists of all time, having sold more than 75 million records, while receiving 19 Grammy Awards for my musical work, and other nominations. Consistently ranked as one of the greatest rappers ever, I was ranked number one by MTV in their list of The Greatest MCs of All-Time in 2006. Three of my albums, Reasonable Doubt (1996), The Blueprint (2001), and The Black Album(2003), are considered landmarks in the genre with all of them featured in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.