Via The Daily Beast – But everyone’s favorite homophone-happy MC, who rides the subway with adorable old ladies, has a long, troubling history that’s been all but erased from our collective memory.
There are the early tales. According to an interview with The Guardian to promote his memoir, Decoded, when Jay Z was 12, the Brooklyn rapper shot his older, drug-addicted brother over a stolen ring. His brother, thankfully, survived and refused to press charges.
“I thought my life was over. I thought I’d go to jail forever,” Jay Z’s said of the shooting. In his teen years, he’s admitted to dealing drugs, recently telling Vanity Fair, “I mean, I know about budgets. I was a drug dealer.”
But let’s give Jay Z the benefit of the doubt and chalk these adolescent indiscretions up to his near-impossible surroundings. (Jay Z’s representative did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Jay Z made waves when, in 2012, he vowed to drop the word “bitch” from his rap vocabulary in the wake of the birth of his daughter, Blue Ivy, offering a vaccine for the hip-hop world’s rampant misogyny. The stance, however, lasted about as long as his pseudo-retirement. But the fact that one of his favorite words is “bitch” is nothing compared to another video that went viral this year. Around the time of the release of his second album, 1997’s In My Lifetime, Vol. I, Jay Z sat down for an interview with 2 Live Crew’s Luther Campbell. But this isn’t any normal interview. Next to Jay Z, a topless woman is seen performing oral sex on top of another topless woman, while the two giddy rappers laugh and look on. If that isn’t the height of female objectification, I don’t know what is.
Pretty bad, right? Well, that’s nothing compared to the time Jay Z stabbed someone.
Read more: The Daily Beast
