Jay-Z is one of the wealthiest musicians in the world, and is married to another one of the wealthiest musicians in the world, Beyoncé. Practically synonymous with fame at this point of his career, his 13-album solo catalog and handful of collaborative albums with Beyoncé, Kanye West, and more have given the world a litany of hits and memories over the last three decades.
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But, there are still some fascinating and important facts about the New Yorker that are not common knowledge yet but help to accentuate how relevant of a cultural figure he is. To this day, evident in both No. 4 and 5 on the list below, new details and insights about his life continue to emerge, giving fans and listeners a continuously growing scope of what it means to be Jay-Z.
Here five things to know about Hov.
1. He Went to High School with The Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes
Before and after The Notorious B.I.G.’s 1997 death, Jay-Z collaborated with his fellow New York brethren on songs like “Brooklyn’s Finest” (1996), “I Love The Dough” (1997), and “A Dream” (2002). Additionally, Jay also connected with Busta Rhymes in 2000 for the song “Why We Die,” featuring DMX. Why go we bring this up? Because at a time, Jay-Z went to school with both Busta and Biggie.
Before moving to Long Island, Busta lived in Brooklyn and attended George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn. Both Biggie, the same grade as Busta, and Hov, a couple of grades above Busta, also went to George Westinghouse, and both already had their sights set on a rap career. In fact, in a 2010 interview with MTV, Busta recalled rap battles he had with Jay-Z back in the day.
“One day, somebody came up to me and was like, ‘Yo, Hov is in the cafeteria,'” he said. “They weren’t calling him Hov at the time; they were calling him Jay. ‘Do you want to step to him on some rhyme shit?’ So I go… He kind of got the best of the situation. I got to give it up. He was so ill and his arsenal was so long that he had more than what I did. I spit my one rap, and my tank was empty real fast. He came with two or three after that, and I was like, ‘Here we go.’ But I gave it my best.”
2. Jay-Z Does Not Write Down Any Lyrics
For the majority of his career, Jay-Z has stayed true to his habit of not writing his lyrics down, instead opting to either freestyle or “punch in” during recording. Although he started his career jotting his lyrics down in notebooks, he quickly went away from it because it felt unnatural to him. During a 2007 interview with MTV, he explained how he arrived at this method.
“It just felt better [the way I do it now],” he said. “In my mind, I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna sit down and I’mma just write it and really do this thing a certain way.’ But your natural process is your process. It’s difficult to go back to what you was doing when you was 15, or 16 years old. My process is different now. It sounds great on paper, like, ‘I’mma sit down, I’m going to write the entire album like I did before.’ But once you get back in the studio and you’ve been doing this process for years and years now, it just felt natural to do it the way I’ve been doing it: no paper, no pen, just listen to the music.”
Earlier this year, Lil Wayne said that he stopped writing down his lyrics because he was inspired by Jay-Z.
3. He Wrote a Memoir
In 2010, Jay-Z officially released his memoir/autobiography titled Decoded. The book includes lyrics from his best songs, anecdotes from throughout his career, and his opinions on societal issues and politics.
At one moment in Decoded, Jay-Z recalls making “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” his first Billboard Top 15 hit.
4. He Has an Exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library
In July 2023, the Brooklyn Public Library opened “The Book of HOV,” which features memorabilia from Jay-Z’s career and displays that honor his contributions to hip-hop. Additionally, the library plastered his lyrics all over the front of their building.
“Brooklyn Public Library, including the Center for Brooklyn History, is home to the most expansive collection of Brooklyn history in the world, and Jay-Z is an important part of the borough’s story,” the BPL’s CEO Linda Johnson said of the exhibit. “We are proud to celebrate his mastery of music, poetry, the written word, and the oral tradition, and we hope the exhibit will inspire visitors to bet on themselves and pursue their own dreams, musical or otherwise.”
5. Jay-Z is the First Rapper with 10 Multi-Platinum Albums
Also in July, Jay-Z’s 2009 album Blueprint 3 became certified 2x platinum by RIAA, making him the first rapper and second-ever Black male to have 10 or more multi-platinum solo albums. The next closest to him of any hip-hop artist is Eminem, with eight multi-platinum solo albums.
Photo by Kevin Kane/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
