30 years after ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ Jay-Z’s career embodies hip-hop’s biggest contradictions
What happens when a rapper whose early work explored capitalism’s brutality becomes one of the system’s most successful beneficiaries?
Rapper Jay-Z poses behind his desk in the New York offices of Roc-A-Fella Records in April 1996. Nitro/Getty Images
“Reasonable Doubt” was not the first rap album I ever owned. But Jay-Z’s debut was…