Jay Z—the solo act with the most number-one albums in history—will become the first hip-hop artist inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, where he will join such legends as Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and Irving Berlin. Wyatt Mason takes stock of an artist whose astonishing creativity, business career, and public profile have transformed America over the last two decades.
Spiders, Charles Darwin explains in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1872), "are the lowest animals which voluntarily produce any sound . . . the same note, repeated rhythmically." Why do they do it? Darwin has no doubts: "The chief and in some cases exclusive use appears to be either to call or to charm the opposite sex." Chasing the question up the evolutionary ladder, Darwin confirms his findings in every species. Frogs and toads, he explains, vocalize "incessantly during breeding season," as do male alligators, who bellow and roar; birds sing; and among mammals, he says, most males use their voices only when trying to breed, tending to be "absolutely mute excepting at this season."
So when Darwin reaches the evolutionary summit and finds us Homo sapiens having our hootenanny, he's exasperated: Humans don't follow the evolutionary protocol of the animal kingdom. The serenade-beneath-balcony makes for sweet cinematic romance, but human procreation isn't dependent upon males of our species breaking into song. A rationalist like Darwin can only throw up his hands. "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man," he concludes, "they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed."
Of that mystery there's no end, but for our purposes, it begins with William Learned Marcy (1786–1857). A Massachusetts-born lawyer and statesman, Marcy fought in the War of 1812; served as a state supreme court justice, senator, and governor, all for New York; then advanced to secretary of war under one U. S. president and secretary of state under another. In his lifetime, a Coast Guard schooner was named in Marcy's honor; after his death, his portrait graced the $1,000 silver certificate; and both the highest peak in New York (5,344 feet) and a town in the center of the state bear his name.
But his final distinction is the most memorable, if least glorious: In 1949, twenty-eight acres in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant were developed by the New York City Housing Authority as the site for a complex of six-story buildings, twenty-seven of which were christened "Marcy Houses." For a time, the seventeen hundred apartments provided affordable housing. But like Cabrini-Green or Robert Taylor in Chicago, Marcy declined through the years, becoming increasingly unsafe and decreasingly policed. Heroin hobbled the community during the 1970s before crack turned these neighborhoods into ruins. Thus William Learned Marcy, the man on a $1,000 bill, became Brooklyn's patron saint of poverty.
Now imagine a boy of eight named Shawn making his way, one summer afternoon in 1978, through those twenty-eight acres as he heads to his parents' apartment in Marcy. His mother, Gloria, works for the comptroller's office as a clerk; his father, Adnis—whose employment history is unknown but who we do know was the son of a Pentecostal pastor—will leave the family the following year after his little brother, Ray, is murdered at a Brooklyn bar. (Adnis thereafter will decline first into drink, then drugs, and then, when Shawn is eleven, into oblivion: He won't see his son again for two decades.) For now, in 1978, Shawn is returning to parents who have an R&B-heavy record collection, to Soul Train playing on Saturdays when the family of six cleans house together, and to a basketball hoop in the living room that Adnis installed.
So Shawn is making his way, and he sees a circle of older boys standing on the street, clapping, laughing. The boy makes a beeline for the circle. You can see it: a little kid sprinting flat out, pushing his way through the crowd, through bigger boys arranged like the petals of