JAY-Z ESQUIRE FEATURE

Thursday, January 7, 2010

From the February 2010 "People Who Matter" issue — on sale soon

Jay-Z walks into a gracious chamber at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. It's the same room where, thousands of years ago, crown moldings were born. He walks in and already waiting for him is a tight litter of reporters with their recording de-vices and their notebooks. This is the sort of intimate press thing where the celebrity talks about whatever product he is endorsing, and they serve cold sandwiches and hummus dip. The product today is DJ Hero, a video game with which un-urban kids and guys in their mid-thirties with Costco memberships can scratch Jay-Z's beats from the suburbanness of their own homes.

He sits down in his hard-backed chair and the reporters collect around him in a buttery little square. But Jay-Z doesn't really sit. What he actually does is slalom down in his chair, real low like it's a water slide. Seventy-three inches of all-black everything, laid out like a ramp. Black sunglasses, too, to block the hotel light.

"Hey, fuck shit," he says, and he smiles so the whole room laughs.

He's cool and tall and black. He's witty and very cocky, but the cockiness is the unannoying kind you might admire.

He speaks differently, more warmly, to women than to men. He might be winking but you can never tell behind the sunglasses. At forty, he's learned how to adjust for his audience, while the audience only notices that he's pretty cool, and even kind of like them. An un-urban white guy says, "Oh, word," after Jay-Z sublimely answers his question about an old-school gaming console. When Jay-Z charmingly says he's so good at the game that he would destroy a female reporter at it, she laughs for too long.

A few years ago, President Clinton did the same thing. Jay was in the president's ear at the Spotted Pig, the Manhattan restaurant he co-owns, and the president was doubled over, holding his belly, southern breathless, saying, "Stop. Stop it. You're killing me!"

What's different here is that Jay-Z is not Bruce Springsteen. Jay-Z is a half-dangerous rapper who grew up in the gat-happy projects of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He sold crack on feral corners and shot his brother for stealing his ring. Badass, for real. So it's a little weird, isn't it, that he can make reporters and presidents alike giggle?

Two days from now, Jay-Z will perform the new New York anthem "Empire State of Mind" before a sellout crowd at Yankee Stadium. He will join U2 onstage in Berlin and get introduced by Bono to German screams as "the mayor of New York City."

The very next morning, back in New York, Jay-Z will be introduced by the real mayor of New York as a "great New Yorker" to New York screams at the ticker-tape parade, before performing his anthem and riding atop one of the Yankees' floats.

That same night, Jay-Z will enjoy an early dinner with A-Rod at Manhattan restaurant Nello's before Maybaching down to Madison Square Garden to watch good friend and fellow superstar LeBron James crush the New York Knicks.

Around this time, the embattled governor of New York will call a reporter to confirm that Jay-Z has indeed been an inspiration during his recent rough patch. Governor Paterson says, "Jay tells me, 'I've got your back.' "

But it's the other thing the governor brings up that's more interesting. Paterson says that every time he sees a Yankee hat, he thinks it's Jay, "because he understands branding. I would daresay there are few people who understand it better."

Ah, branding! It's how you make a product so dearly iconic that people say the brand name when they mean the item itself, like "Kleenex" for "tissue." And Jay-Z, here at the rich old Plaza Hotel dressed darkly and sitting horizontally, understands it really well. In fact, he understands it so damn well that he's doing it differently than anyone ever has before, which is making him more famous than any hip-hop artist ever, and making him more money, too. But it's the unintentional part of what he's doing that's changing America forever.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/people-who-matter-2010/jay-z-business-0210#ixzz0byZRSTOW