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Jay-Z

If Trick Daddy is the Mayor of Dade County and T.I. is the King of the South, then without a doubt Jay-Z has to be Supreme Emperor of the Rap Universe. Since his humble beginnings as a performer in New York’s underground rap scene in the 1980’s, Jay-Z has risen to become the world’s richest hip hop artist; in addition to his position as the CEO of Roc-A-Fella Records (Jadakiss, Kanye West, Freeway) and the Rocawear clothing line, he also owns the New Jersey Nets NBA team. With a fortune estimated at around $940 million, Jay-Z (real name Shawn Corey Carter) outshines his closest competitor P. Diddy by almost 300 million dollars.

Jay-Z’s entry into the rap game sounds just like everyone else’s - he dropped out of high school and began selling drugs to get by, recording and participating in rap battles in his free time. After gaining notoriety as a consummate freestyler - slinging bars against both DMX and Busta Rhymes in amateur battles before any of them became famous - in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Jay-Z became frustrated that no major label would sign him. He formed his own label Rock-A-Fella Records in 1996, acquiring childhood friend The Notorious B.I.G. as his first artist. Jay-Z only had to release one album independently, 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, before scoring a distribution deal with the Island Def Jam Music Group (Ludacris, Rihanna).

Since Reasonable Doubt Jay-Z has released no less than nine solo albums, which combined have sold over 35 million copies. Of these, the most commercially successful was 1998’s Vol 2...Hard Knock Life (with over 8 million units moved), while the most critically acclaimed would probably be 2003’s The Black Album. Though Jay-Z occasionally flirted with different styles - including a bluesy, soul-backed style in The Blueprint (2001) and a glitzy, pop-rap sound for In My Lifetime, Vol. I (1997) - he generally is thought to be one of the forerunners of the "Mafioso rap" style, which juxtaposes the gritty elements of gangster rap with an indulgent and expensive aesthetic, often reminiscent of mob movies like Scarface and The Godfather. Some of Jay-Z’s biggest hits throughout the late 1990’s and early 2000’s include "Big Pimpin", "99 Problems", "Bonnie and Clyde", "Change Clothes", and "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)".