It’s common knowledge that Jay-Z doesn’t write down his lyrics. The Brooklyn rapper has become one of the greatest lyricists of all time without putting pen to paper, using his memory to put words, lines and entire songs together, not to mention coming up with quadruple entendres.
That process began as a teenager when he was on the streets as a drug dealer. He didn’t carry any paper notebooks around, so he had no choice but to keep his rhymes in his head. “The more I got into the street, when I was 18 or 19, the further away from the notebook I became,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “When I was outside, I’d start thinking of all these lyrics, and I’d find anything I could write on.
“So I had all these pieces of paper in my pocket, then I’d get back to the house and dump all these papers out and put ’em in the notebook. You can only have so many pieces of paper in your pockets, so I started memorising some lines until I got back to the book. It was like an exercise. Pretty soon I would just memorise all these songs, and it grew from there. When I made my first demos, around ’92, that was my process.”
However, that same process has also led to Jay-Z losing many ideas. “I’ve lost a lot of songs that way,” he told CBS News. “I’ve lost a lot of material. But it just came with life.”
The only time he ever wrote down lyrics was for ‘Can I Live’ from his debut album Reasonable Doubt in 1996. “What happened was, I was doing that song with someone else, and they heard the first verse and they was like, ‘Man, you take that song. Finish it, ’cause it sounds like you got a lot more to say,’” he said to MTV News. “So I just wanted to get it down quick, I didn’t want to keep going over it. It was like [the album] mastering time, so I just sat down in the booth and wrote that [verse].”
Jay-Z attempted to write down all of his lyrics for 2003’s The Black Album, which was intended to be his final album before retirement, but he couldn’t shake off the format he knows best. “It just felt better [the way I do it now],” he said. “In my mind, I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna sit down and I’mma just write it and really do this thing a certain way.’ But your natural process is your process. It’s difficult to go back to what you was doing when you was 15, 16 years old. My process is different now.”
He added, “It sounds great on paper, like ‘I’mma sit down, I’m going to write the entire album like I did before.’ But once you get back in the studio and you’ve been doing this process for years and years now, so it just felt natural to do it the way I’ve been doing it: no paper, no pen, just listen to the music.”
