In 1996, hip-hop was an irresistible cultural force determined to overtake the 1970s originators as the genre’s “golden era”.
But in the midst of this renaissance, where competition was fierce, rose a young MC who managed to alter the game in his own image.
With that debut album turning 25 this week, a new five-part original audio series by Breaking Atoms: The Hip-Hop Podcast titled “Brooklyn’s Finest”, hosted by the hip-hop commentators Sumit Sharma and Chris Mitchell, chronicles the path Jay walked on the road to constructing it.
Before he was married to Beyoncé, closing million-dollar deals with the NFL and leading the line of support of prison reform, Jay-Z was merely a precocious, self-sufficient young man trying to get noticed.
In 1986, as part of a rap group called High Potent with his fellow Marcy inhabitant, MC and mentor Jaz-O, Jay-Z got his first taste of fame with the group single “HP Gets Busy”.
Years of honing his craft in the early 1990s on guest features and “posse cuts” throughout New York would lead Jay to DJ Clark Kent, an industry figure whose belief in his skills were so strong he built a studio in his home for Jay to record.
With his buzz in the streets reaching fever pitch, he would convene in 1994 at the legendary D&D Studios in Manhattan – where Nas recorded Illmatic – to lay down what would become Reasonable Doubt.
Over 14 tracks, a slew of boom bap beats provided by Jaz, Clark Kent, Ski Beatz, DJ Premier and Irv Gotti ranged from the rhythmic, danceable funk of “Can’t Knock the Hustle” and “Ain’t No N*gga” to the ominous “22 Twos”, a would-be soundtrack for a rap Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Rarely had a rapper captured this aspect of African-American life before Jay: he placed you in the room where the crack he sold was cooked and bagged up, in meetings with his Colombian suppliers, and inside his own psyche as he made sense of his path.
Jay wore his battle scars proudly, with the confidence of John Gotti in his prime as he laced his lyrical product onto the rap game.
Hip-hop historian Dart Adams conveyed the album’s quality to Breaking Atoms: “If you read a noir crime novel that was written by somebody who wasn’t adept at using prose, that’s what Reasonable Doubt is.
In one review written by Charlie Braxton in The Source Magazine – the Bible of hip-hop journalism, famous for its five-mic rating system – rated the project just four out of five, saying: “In terms of the subject matter, Jay-Z isn’t saying anything new.
Speaking to Breaking Atoms, Nick Raphael, who, alongside Christian Tattersfield, signed Jay to a worldwide distribution deal in 1996 through London-based Northwestside Records, recalls meeting Jay in New York and seeing him “driving a 190 E Mercedes-Benz with a Roc-A-Fella logo on the front, leaning out of the car handing flyers and CDs” in a gung-ho spate of grassroots promotion.
We just got in there and did what we had to ; we were grimy in that sense.” Here, in the UK, broadcaster and music executive Pete Tong played “Can’t Knock the Hustle” on his influential BBC Radio 1 show, helping Jay’s stature grow in real time on this side of the Atlantic.
It was this community spirit that makes those who were there refer to Reasonable Doubt as a “family album”, one which greatly benefited not just from Jay’s efforts, but of the collective around him.
For ushering in the career of one of the genre’s greatest exports and offering a period piece of the African-American experience, it will continue to live long in the hearts and minds of those who were there, and the fans it inspires.