 a flower around a buzzing center, or like metal shavings drawn to a magnet vibrating in the middle. If those similes don't quite cut it for you, these will, since they were written by the man the boy became—Jay Z—thirty-two years later: "It felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids, no bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star."
The star at the center of that circle was a boy from the neighborhood. Here's how Jay Z describes him and the moment:
His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time—thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps. He rhymed about nothing—the sidewalk, the benches—or he'd go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him, call out someone's leaning sneakers or dirty Lee jeans. And then he'd go in on how clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him. Then he'd just start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much better they were than yours, how he was the best that ever did it, in all five boroughs and beyond. He never stopped moving, not dancing, just rotating in the center of the circle, looking for his next target. The sun started to set, the crowd moved in closer, the next clap kept coming, and he kept meeting it with another rhyme. It was like watching some kind of combat, but he was alone in the center. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him. I was dazzled. That's some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.
Watching Slate—whose name means something to write on—it was like a switch was thrown. That night, Jay Z says, he began writing. The verses started coming, filling up his spiral notebook, and then a three-ring binder. It was easy, constant, fluid. He'd pound out beats, rhymes, and write down what came. He could do that. His notebook became a kind of vault. Shawn took to "stuffing it in my mattress like it was cash."
To try to take the full measure of Jay Z—a forty-seven-year-old rapper who has sold tens of millions of albums; a recording artist with twenty-one Grammys; the solo act with the record for the most Billboard number-one albums in the history of recorded music: thirteen; a founder of the clothing retailer Rocawear (with sales in the hundreds of millions); a former president and CEO of Def Jam; a founder of the 40/40 clubs; a founder of Roc Nation, a full-service entertainment company; a founder of Roc Nation Sports, a talent agency for athletes; an owner of Tidal, the artist-owned streaming-music service; the owner of the Budweiser Made in America Festival; a former minority co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets; a producer of film and television; a philanthropist who funds the Shawn Carter Foundation, of which his mother is CEO; a man who, with his wife, Beyoncé Knowles (not incidentally a recording artist with twenty-two Grammys herself, and tens of millions of albums sold), has a combined net worth of close to a billion dollars—is fruitless, hopeless, meaningless. He isn't a man so much as a region, one with its own weather, customs, language.
As he walked through Marcy in 1978 and happened upon Slate, Shawn Corey Carter understood, with his body if not yet with his mind, that the center of the circle was where he was headed. That circle, those circles: In recent years, those informal gatherings of rappers have come to be termed ciphers. The word itself is old. In Arabic, çifr is the arithmetic symbol for zero or naught, a translation of the Sanskrit word for "empty." The word cipher, before it added its most recent meaning, already had three in English, each perfectly apt for that circle of young men in Marcy, what can happen there. Seen from the drone-god, the rapper's cipher was a zero in shape: null, void, an empty