On “The Black Album,” he uses their finest offerings - grand canvases built from reupholstered soul, rock and gospel - to corroborate what is effectively a series of arguments, in which Jay, like a defendant representing himself in court, presents his case for rap supremacy. To seize the top spot, Jay assembled a dream team that included many of hip-hop’s greatest producers: the Neptunes, Kanye West, Timbaland, Just Blaze and Rick Rubin. And the apotheosis of Biggie and Tupac - only six and seven years dead - left virtually all remaining aspirants vying for third place. Dre, was at the time the most popular rap artist on the planet. 50 Cent, riding on the shoulders of Eminem and Dr. He didn’t only want to retire (itself a stunt in a genre that tends to leave you before you can leave it), he wanted to retire as the Greatest of All Time, hip-hop’s holy grail. “The Black Album” represented Jay’s biggest gambit yet. His teammates and even some teachers were stunned. I remember when one quit varsity football to better focus on his A.P.

In the hallways after one activity or another, I would see other Black and brown kids on similar tracks and nod.

I played basketball and trained for the 200-meter relay. I took dual-credit courses at the local community college and drove downtown for SAT prep. I joined the National Honor Society, Peer Assistance Leadership and Service and the French club. Like my older sister, who was then two years into a finance degree and on a gravity-defying trajectory of her own, I had spent most of high school on a mission to make something respectable of myself. My parents, born in agrarian villages in colonized Nigeria, had settled there in the mid-1990s as middle-class academics. My family lived in the suburbs of Houston. Half amused, they would scribble their verdict in the margins: “Shameless but hungry.”īy that time, the fall of 2003, I had already plotted the next 10 years of my life - the graduate school, the job, the house, the car. I imagined eagle-eyed college admissions officers poring over my file, spotting any latent passions discovered in the heat of application season. I knew that it might look fishy - adding on another extracurricular so late in the game - but I figured making the effort could also work in my favor. In my senior year of high school, I joined the student council.

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