June 23, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Rap superstar and business tycoon Shawn Carter -- better known as Jay-Z
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, June 23, Graphic News:  He has a penthouse in New York’s TriBeCa district, a stake in the American basketball team the New Jersey Nets, and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina. A supporter of Barack Obama, Carter was seen at a staff party to celebrate the new President’s inauguration earlier this year. He toured the globe with Mary J. Blige last year, answered his critics with a winning gig at a rain-soaked Glastonbury last summer and has, this year, been awarded the Grammy for Best Rap Performance for his collaboration on Swagga Like Us.
 
Life hasn’t always been so glittering. Brought up mainly by his mother in a housing project in Brooklyn, Carter was exposed, as a child, to drug dealing and knife crime. He began rapping in his teens, using the stage name, Jazzy -- later Jay-Z -- a possible reference to the subway lines which intersected in his neighbourhood. With two friends, he founded his own label, Roc-a-Fella Records and released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, in 1996. It was an instant hit in the R&B chart. He sealed his success two years later with Vol. 2 Hard Knock Life, the title track bizarrely featuring a version of the song sung by the orphans in the Broadway show, Annie.
 
Linked with Beyonce Knowles since 2002, the pair worked together on her number one single, Crazy in Love, and were married amid great secrecy on April 4 last year. In 2001 Carter was put on probation for three years for his part in a nightclub stabbing in 1999.
/ENDS