0 Excerpts From Jay-Z"s "Decoded"

Here a couple excerpts from Jay-Z's literary debut entitled: "Decoded". The book explains the origin and meaning behind some of Jay-Z's most intricate lyrics and also contains memoir-esque stories like the ones below. You can click here for more excerpts from "Decoded", which will be released November 16th, 2010.

On The Dangers Of Success:

Jay-Z writes about the danger hip-hop stars face — mostly at the hands of other hip-hop artists — when they become famous. Of close friend the Notorious B.I.G., who, along with Tupac Shakur, who were shot and killed at their peak, he says: “They were both perfectly safe before they started rapping; they weren’t being hunted by killers until they got into music. Biggie was on the streets before he started releasing music, but he never had squads of shooters (or the Feds) coming after him until he was famous.”

He recalls meeting with Eminem in the studio in 2003 to record “Moment of Clarity” for Jay-Z’s “Black Album.” When Jay-Z went to hug his friend, he realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest. At the time, Eminem had three multi-platinum albums and a No. 1 film, “8 Mile.” Jay-Z believed Eminem should have been “on a boat somewhere” without the worry of being shot or attacked by an enemy from the underworld of rap.

On Getting High with Biggie

Biggie made a cameo appearance in the 1996 video for “Ain’t no N - - - a,” which Jay-Z was filming with Foxy Brown in Miami just when he started to break. Jay-Z says he looked down on smoking pot as counterproductive, and only did so on vacation. “I could count the number of times I’d smoked trees,” he writes. But when Big asked him to smoke, he said to himself, “Relax, you’re not on the streets anymore.” So he smoked, and got stoned out of his mind just before the video started shooting. Laughing at his formerly sober friend, Biggie leaned in and whispered in Jay-Z’s ear: “I got ya.” It took Jay-Z 20 minutes in his room to gather his wits. Later he told his told his friend: “Never again my n - - - a.”

On His First Arrest

Jay-Z’s first arrest came at age 16. He was dealing in Trenton, because his friend “Hill” had a supplier there. Hill had enrolled in the local high school, and one day when Jay-Z went to meet him, he got caught with crack in his pockets on the campus. Since he had no prior arrests, the police let him go, but they confiscated his supply. In order to make up the cash to the supplier, Jay-Z had to go back to Marcy and deal crack 60 hours straight — three days in a row, he writes. He kept awake by “eating cookies and writing rhymes on the back of brown paper bags.”