The Detroit rapper Jay-Z called a “prisoner of his own fame”
Jay-Z is today about as famous as it’s possible to be. A billionaire rapper whose music is critically acclaimed and hugely popular, who is married to arguably the world’s biggest pop star, Jay has firmly been under the spotlight for decades now. He is as A-list as it gets.
But, as the broad narrative running through so much of his music implies, his is a rags-to-riches story. Jay-Z grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn without very much to his name, before, eventually, he made it big in an almost unthinkably extravagant manner. Fame and fortune, in other words, were not always so central to his life. He had to get used to them.
For all its obvious benefits, fame does come with its downsides. Jay has been mindful of this throughout his entire life in the public eye, and, when he was still coming up and building his empire, he keenly observed how fame messed with friends and collaborators who were, at the time, bigger than he was.
In 2010 Jay-Z was the focus of a feature for Interview magazine, during which he started talking about Eminem, with whom he made the track ‘Moment of Clarity’ for The Black Album. They worked together on the song in 2003, which was broadly at the height of Eminem’s fame. He was the biggest rapper in the world, more famous than Jay-Z, and Hov noted how that level of fame messed with the Detroit rapper.
Jay recalled how, when Em arrived in the studio to get to work on ‘Moment of Clarity,’ he hugged him and noticed something disturbing. As Jay pulled Eminem into an embrace, he realised he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
“I couldn’t imagine being that successful,” Jay said, with a touch of irony given how famous he would come to be in the years after this 2010 interview took place. “I mean, he’s a guy who loves rap and wanted to be successful his whole career. Then he finally gets it, and there’s this dark cloud over him.”
Jay explained that, around this time in the early 2000s, some negative things were circulating around Eminem. 50 Cent and Ja Rule were feuding, and the potential for that to spill into serious violence felt very real. Eminem was being pulled into that beef, and he therefore had to take measures to protect himself.
The fact that Eminem, arguably the biggest star in the world at the time, was “afraid to walk around New York freely” was an upsetting thought to Jay. “Here it is,” he recalled thinking about the situation. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted, and now you’re a prisoner of your own fame.”
Jay said he found it sad that Em had “to walk around in a bulletproof vest after you’ve sold 20 million records.” That was the price of all his success, but it was a heavy one. It was a situation Jay-Z would also have to negotiate himself in the years to come.