Jay-Z Is About to Redefine What a Man’s Fifties Look Like
Shawn Carter has rewritten the playbook and outgrown men twice his age. Does a billionaire have anything left to prove?
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The year Shawn Carter turned 20 (1989) was the year Jay-Z was born. A peripatetic hustler, he’d been running the streets, running from poverty — a quest that also helped him outrun, if unwittingly, an early demise. His mentor, Jaz-O, had been sent to London by his record label to record his debut album, and brought along his talented protege. While Jay was overseas, federal officers raided the illegal narcotics trade his band of brothers had going back home, shattering the business and sending much of his cohort to face the judicial system. That European trip took Shawn Carter away so that Jay-Z could remain.
A man’s twenties are for testing hypotheses of success, for seeing what sticks. Not Jay. Even as a teenager, the young entrepreneur was exercising the third-eye foresight that would guide him towards a legacy of transformative craft and unprecedented black business. Despite being wealthier than the elders in his life, he never ceded to contentment, or to his commitment to becoming the greatest rapper alive. Over the subsequent decades, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter survived it all: the crack era, Rockefeller Laws, start-up pains, an assault charge, a declining recording industry, infidelity, aging in a young artist’s game, even the fast-expiring limitations of bravado itself. His reward? Walking into his fifties the most accomplished African American born since the Nixon Administration.
A man’s thirties are for realizing he has painted by the numbers long enough, and for beginning to seek a new kind of agency. That’s the time when men commit to the man they intend to become — a greater feat for men of color, as we’re told at every turn who and what we are. Not Jay. He’d already realized that signing to someone else’s record label was a scenic road towards the riches, and co-founded Roc-a-Fella Records at the ripe old age of 26.
In his thirties he found his legend. Already a double platinum superstar, he went on to make The…
