Murder to excellence: Jay-Z’s reality of growing up in Brooklyn
Jay-Z’s upbringing in Brooklyn could be brutal at times, but, despite the hardships, he clearly holds the New York borough close to his heart.
Jay appeared on the Fresh Air show on NPR in 2010 to reflect on his early life growing up in Brooklyn, specifically in the Marcy Projects, a public housing project in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood. Describing his childhood environment, he said, “You have these three columns of buildings, with four people on each floor, six floors, you know. So you had people to the left of you, right of you, on top and on the bottom of you. It’s a very intense and stressful situation.”
This environment was something of a pressure cooker, with so many people all living within such a tight space. That could be a problem, but, on the other hand, it also led people to share really tight-knit relationships with each other.
“Everyone is going through different things, and in between all that stress and angst and having to deal with one another in such close proximity, there’s so much love,” he said.
Jay painted quite a romantic image of his neighbourhood at its best, describing kids playing around “the johnny pump,” by which he means an open fire hydrant. “And there was the ice cream man coming around,” he said. “And there were all these games that we played.”
Things, when things were going well, could be wonderful in the Marcy Projects, but, as Jay made clear, things could change very quickly for the worse. “And then it would turn,” he said. “Suddenly, it just [turned] violent, and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.”
Growing up this way could, obviously, be deeply stressful. “So it was just [a] weird mix of emotions,” Jay said. “One day your best friend could be killed; the day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike. It was just extreme highs and lows.”
Then there was the crack epidemic, which, according to Jay, hit his neighbourhood “about ’85,” when he was “maybe about 12, 13 years old.”
A young Jay-Z saw firsthand the devastating effects that crack imposed upon his community, especially on those people who were parents. “It changed the authority figure,” he said, “because, with crack cocaine, it was done so openly… So that relationship of respect. Of, ‘I have to respect my elders…’ that dynamic shifted. It broke, forever. And it just changed everything from that point on.”
Jay-Z has rapped about his Brooklyn upbringing lots of times, and he clearly loves his home neighbourhood. But he doesn’t sugarcoat things. He admits that things were hard there.