Decoded

I saw the circle before I saw the kid in the middle. I was nine years old, the summer of 1978, and Marcy was my world. The shadowy bench-lined inner pathways that connected the twenty-seven six-story buildings of Marcy Houses were like tunnels we kids burrowed through. Housing projects can seem like labyrinths to outsiders, as complicated and intimidating as a Moroccan bazaar. But we knew our way around.
 
Marcy sat on top of the G train, which connects Brooklyn to Queens, but not to the city. For Marcy kids, Manhattan is where your parents went to work, if they were lucky, and where we d yellow-bus it with our elementary class on special trips. I m from New York, but I didn t know that at nine. The street signs for Flushing, Marcy, Nostrand, and Myrtle avenues seemed like metal flags to me: Bed-Stuy was my country, Brooklyn my planet.
 
When I got a little older Marcy would show me its menace, but for a kid in the seventies, it was mostly an adventure, full of concrete corners to turn, dark hallways to explore, and everywhere other kids. When you jumped the fences to play football on the grassy patches that passed for a park, you might find the field studded with glass shards that caught the light like diamonds and would pierce your sneakers just as fast. Turning one of those concrete corners you might bump into your older brother clutching dollar bills over a dice game, Cee-Lo being called out like hardcore bingo. It was the seventies and heroin was still heavy in the hood, so we would dare one another to push a leaning nodder off a bench the way kids on farms tip sleeping cows. The unpredictability was one of the things we counted on. Like the day when I wandered up to something I d never seen before: a cipher but I wouldn t have called it that; no one would ve back then. It was just a circle of scrappy, ashy, skinny Brooklyn kids laughing and clapping their hands, their eyes trained on the center. I might have been with my cousin B-High, but I

JAY-Z (Shawn Carter) is one of the most successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs of all time.

Compelling . . . provocative, evocative . . . Part autobiography, part lavishly illustrated commentary on the author s own work, Decoded gives the reader a harrowing portrait of the rough worlds Jay-Z navigated in his youth, while at the same time deconstructing his lyrics. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

One of a handful of books that just about any hip hop fan should own. The New Yorker
 
Elegantly designed, incisively written . . . an impressive leap by a man who has never been known for small steps. Los Angeles Times
 
A riveting exploration of Jay-Z s journey . . . So thoroughly engrossing, it reads like a good piece of cultural journalism. The Boston Globe 

Shawn Carter s most honest airing of the experiences he drew on to create the mythic figure of Jay-Z . . . The scenes he recounts along the way are fascinating. Entertainment Weekly 

Hip-hop s renaissance man drops a classic. . . . Heartfelt, passionate and slick. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)