The Book of Jay

In October, Jay won a five-label bidding war and signed the Roots, whose contract with the Interscope subsidiary Geffen was up. "What's scarin' the shit out of me," says Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, "is that his priority with Game Theory [the Roots' next album] is us turning in a critically acclaimed album. When I talk about singles, he says, 'Get that thought out of your head.' He knows, and the one thing that [Interscope CEO] Jimmy [Iovine] didn't know, is that there's no fooling your audience."

As Jay walks around the twenty-ninth floor, he yells out little jokes to his people, getting them to smile and laugh, trying to make everyone comfortable to have him around. "The employees had to get more accustomed to it than him," a friend says. "They're walking into his office saying, 'Oh, my God, that's Jay-Z!' And he's like, 'Hey, I'm just here to work.'"

Jay strolls around the corner to check out West's then-unreleased video for "Gold Digger" on someone's laptop. He's impressed by West's performance, but toward the end there's a shot of an angry woman holding a dagger. That's a problem. MTV won't play a video that prominently features a knife, but no one's had any luck persuading West to edit out the knife; Shakira has a knife in her video for "La Tortura," he argues, so why can't he? But her knife is in a kitchen scene while she's cutting onions. The shot has to be changed and delivered to MTV by 8 a.m. Monday, or they'll miss the chance to get onto MTV's rotation for a whole week. So Jay has to figure out the proper way to get one of his most stubborn and most successful artists to acquiesce. (West later agreed to obscure the knife with sparks of light.) The video-promotions woman, who worked with Jay when he was an artist, laughs at his predicament. "You used to do this to me," she says. "And I used to say, 'I can't wait till you're on the other side.'"

[Excerpt From Issue 989 — December 15, 2005]