Rap impresario Jay-Z’s extraordinary life, from his humble Marcy Projects beginnings to his perch as a pop cultural icon and husband of Beyoncé, will be detailed in an in-depth memoir to be released this fall.
The 336-page book, titled Decoded, will be released in November and include:
Interviews with his family and friends that initially blew him away when he first started the project more than half a decade ago. “It’s too much. For the book, I was interviewed, people close to me were interviewed. So I was learning a lot of things I didn’t know as a child,” he told Rolling Stone.
The book will also talk about more than what Jay-Z was able to deposit in some of his biggest hits.
“It’s not anything I haven’t said in the past, in songs. It’s just more detailed,” said Hov. “A song is three minutes long. A book doesn’t have to rhyme, and it has no time limit, so you can say exactly how everything went.”
Hov said the memoir will cover his turbulent rearing in Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Marcy Projects and will also detail his years as a drug dealer.
Jay, who collaborated on Decoded with Dream Hampton, the former editor of The Source, was originally set to drop his personal memoir back in 2003, which was intended to come out with the release of The Black Album. The book was to be titled The Black Book. Jay allegedly nixed the companion piece to the classic album because he wasn’t ready to share a lot of the personal things that were in the book with the rest of the world. –terry shropshire
