Being faithful to the one-year-one-record tradition, Jay-Z issued Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life saw light and brought the first Grammy award to the rapper. Besides the hardcore tracks, the work featured pop rap - such things, as Sunshine and The City Is Mine showed that Jay-Z is not serious and brutal all the time and exposed him to a wider auditory. 1, fortified the success of the Reasonable Doubt.

In 1997, the autobiographic disc In My Lifetime, Vol. along with the theme of gangster life made the whole New York talk about Jay-Z. Having found a reputable distributor Priority Records (which later would become Def Jam, headed by Jay-Z himself), the artist recorded his debut album Reasonable Doubt in 1996. Jay-Z was the member of the hip-hop command Original Flavor for a short time, but then instead of signing to a major recording company, he decided to start his own label Roc-a-Fella Records. The colleague told to the fresher some of his experience about show business and advised what to do in order to become prominent in rap circles.

Once, when Jay-Z was wondering around the streets, he accidentally ran across a rapper with small fame called Big Jaz, or Jay-O. He started rapping being a teenager, and in the neighborhood, people called him Jazzy, or Jay-Z. So the boy soon became independent and learned how to take care of himself. His father left the family when Sean was just a kid, and they were constantly short of money.

Sean Corey Carter, professionally famous as Jay-Z, was born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York.

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