The song Jay-Z wrote from the perspective of heroin
To listen to the chorus of ‘I Know,’ a song lifted from Jay-Z’s tenth studio album American Gangster, you wouldn’t necessarily think of it as anything other than a standard love song.
“And I know, and I know, and I know, and I know (Uhh, I know what you like),” Jay and his collaborator on the track, Pharrell Williams, croon. “And I know, and I know, and I know, and I know (I know what you love).” It’s only when you listen more carefully to the verses that the true meaning of the track becomes clear. This isn’t an attempt at straight-up romance. It’s a song about heroin, written from the perspective of heroin.
Jay has written songs about drugs before, and he’s spoken publicly about his past life in that world. He wasn’t even a teenager when he first started dealing crack, aged just 12, and while that is obviously a bleak scenario for a child to find themselves in, Jay does credit the experience with helping to form the man he would later become. “On the streets, you had to operate with integrity,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2009. “If you broke your word to someone, he wasn’t going to take you to court—he was going to deal with you himself. So it was here in the projects that I learned loyalty.”
Still, this positive lesson doesn’t mean that he is now blind to the depravities of drug addiction—although as a kid he found it difficult to see. Asked by The Guardian in 2010 if he was aware, as a young drug-dealer, quite how destructive the crack he was selling really was, he said no. “No way,” he claimed. “You just think people are buying your service, and it’s so normal, you just think you’re coming of age. It’s everywhere. The smell, the stench is in the hallway—that’s one of the things about the crack epidemic [of the 1980s], people had lost their sense of pride… The desperation.”
For his part, Jay claims that he never took any of the drugs that he was out on the streets selling. In that same Guardian interview, he noted that there were informal standards and principles in place that he and his peers abided by, some of which were lifted from pop culture—like, for example, the warning from the film Scarface: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” He noted, “We had these guidelines to help us out. Some of us died, some of us didn’t. I never wanted that. I saw what it was doing to the community.”
So Jay never got high off his own supply, but ‘I Know’ seems to be written by someone who knows addiction intimately: “Morning, she rush for my touch / This is about lust, cold sweats occur when I’m not with her / My presence is a must- must- must-.” But Jay came by this perspective not by taking drugs himself, but from knowing plenty of people who did and, also, by having an addictive personality in his own way, albeit one that fixates on other things besides drugs.
On this subject, he explained to Rolling Stone in 2007, “I have had addictions, that’s how I know how [to write a song like ‘I Know’]. I was addicted to hustlin’, addicted to the adrenaline rush. Then I was addicted to the rap game.” It may not be precisely the same thing, but clearly Jay views his relationship to work as a sort of addiction, which he called upon in order to create ‘I Know.’