Jay-Z

📍Marcy Houses, Brooklyn, NY 11206, USA

“Shawn Corey Carter was born in Brooklyn in December 1969 and grew up in the Marcy Houses, a large public housing project of brick towers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the youngest of four children of Gloria Carter and Adnis Reeves. His mother worked as a clerk, and when his father left the family when Shawn was about eleven, she raised the children on her own. Marcy was a tough place in the 1980s, marked by poverty and the crack epidemic, but his mother filled the apartment with music, playing her records of soul and R&B. Shawn was a quick, clever boy who loved words. His mother bought him a boombox for his birthday, and he would bang out beats on the kitchen table late into the night, filling notebooks with rhymes, until his family called him Jazzy, which later became Jay-Z. He went to Eli Whitney High School in Brooklyn, then George Westinghouse High School, where his classmates included Busta Rhymes and The Notorious B.I.G., and then to Trenton Central High School in New Jersey, but he did not graduate. Like many young men in Marcy, he turned to selling drugs, a part of his life he has written about honestly. He learned from the older rapper Jaz-O, who took him under his wing. Unable to get a record deal, he co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records in 1995 and released Reasonable Doubt in 1996, describing life in Marcy. He went on to become one of the best-selling and most successful musicians and entrepreneurs in the world, the first billionaire rapper. He has never forgotten Marcy, and through his foundation he has helped young people from neighbourhoods like it go to college.”

Sources: ca.news.yahoo.com eurweb.com Wikipedia: Jay-Z