In 1996, Jay-Z made his mark on music when he released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt. However, he started taking rapping seriously years before, and the earliest footage of ‘Hova’ shows that he always had that cerebral touch.
For the first few years of Jay’s career, it wasn’t his only occupation, and he infamously supplemented his income by selling crack cocaine. A drug that his brother and father both became hooked on. He knew that this wasn’t the path he wanted to follow, but it was easier said than done.
Living in the belly of New York’s gritty underworld of New York was the making of Jay-Z. However, it could have also been the end of him, and his own mortality was unavoidable. Thankfully, Jay was one of the lucky ones, but even after he first released a single in 1992, he still endeavoured on his double life. Rapping provided him with a chance to escape from the danger zone, and eventually, he’d have the tools to focus on music full-time.
Looking back upon that dark time, he told The Guardian in 2010, “Even when I was making terrible decisions, I was making them out of desperation rather than ignorance. I felt I was in a survival of the fittest situation.”
In the same interview, ‘Hov’ revealed, “I officially quit during the recording process of Reasonable Doubt. I had been trying to hold on to two branches and I said, I’m going to put my all into the music, to make a legitimate life for myself. I never turned back.”
Even though it took him a while to reach his destination, that wasn’t down to a lack of ability on Jay’s part. In 2017, rare early footage emerged of Jay in a rap battle at The New Music Seminar in New York by YouTube user Mike Z.
In the description, the uploader revealed he found the clip after going through old VHS tapes. Elsewhere in the video is DJ Clark Kent, Harry Allen, and the co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, Damon Dash.
A year after the battle, Jay-Z would release ‘Greatest MC’, which contained the same bars that he used during this clip. He ferociously raps, “It hit you like bam biggity bam bam biggity bam, The kid is a wizard, I’m definitely destined to make eight digits, Met up with G Rap on the road to riches.”
Take a journey back to 1993, and watch the first-ever footage of ‘Hova’ rap battling on the mean streets of New York City.
