The world’s first talking camel; Jay Z continues to lie to the pop audience about his life. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he claims that he was a drug dealer as a teenager. As someone was in the know and involved in NY’s Hip Hop scene back in the early 90’s, I can tell you this was a flat out lie. Jay Z was a driver for a Brooklyn drug dealer from Marcy Projects and never once made any transactions himself. His drug dealer employer died in a car accident and Jay Z knew where he kept his money, that is how he got into the music business. All his rap songs were about the life of a real drug dealer, he just drove around.
Jay tells Robinson that his mother knew he was dealing drugs as a teenager, “but we never really had those conversations. We just pretty much ignored it. But she knew. All the mothers knew. It sounds like ‘How could you let your son . . . ’ but I’m telling you, it was normal.”
Jay’s checkered past taught him a few things that he says will come in handy in his new role as a sports agent: “I know about budgets. I was a drug dealer,” he tells Robinson. “To be in a drug deal, you need to know what you can spend, what you need to re-up. Or if you want to start some sort of barbershop or car wash—those were the businesses back then. Things you can get in easily to get out of [that] life. At some point, you have to have an exit strategy, because your window is very small; you’re going to get locked up or you’re going to die.”
Speaking about his childhood, Jay tells Robinson they did the best they could to make ends meet: “We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we’d pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off. We weren’t starving—we were eating, we were O.K. But it was things like you didn’t want to be embarrassed when you went to school; you didn’t want to have dirty sneakers or wear the same clothes over again.”
While he was growing up, Jay says, “crack was everywhere—it was inescapable. There wasn’t any place you could go for isolation or a break. You go in the hallway; [there are] crackheads in the hallway. You look out in the puddles on the curbs—crack vials are littered in the side of the curbs. You could smell it in the hallways, that putrid smell; I can’t explain it, but it’s still in my mind when I think about it.”
Jay tells Robinson he sold crack but never used it, and when asked if he ever felt guilty about contributing to what was becoming an epidemic, he says, “Not until later, when I realized the effects on the community. I started looking at the community on the whole, but in the beginning, no. I was thinking about surviving. I was thinking about improving my situation. I was thinking about buying clothes.”
Jay Z like his hero Obama is a fraud who invented his life to sell records. The Jay Z I remember circa 93 and 94 was some wannabe rapper who had to pay extortion money to the Bonano Crime Family and the Latin Kings to perform in Brooklyn clubs.
As I previous posted, Dehaven who was real drug dealer exposes Jay Z for the fraud he was.
That said, Jay Z was one of the people who help get Obama re-elected. If Republicans had not abandoned Pop Culture back in the 90’s, they could have had rappers exposing Jay Z as liar. Sadly, this man has fans throughout America that believes his lies. The Camel’s lies to the public really irks me.
Tags: Jay Z, Joe Camel, Vanity Fair
