Halfway out of my mind, music on 9, blasting Donny Hathaway.
Songs like This Life Forever reflects that: I ride through the ghetto windows down halfway. During the day he might be in the studio but by night he was still quite involved with typical drug dealing endeavors. Jay-Z This Life Forever There was a time when Jay-Z had one foot in the music industry and one foot still in the streets. In it, Jay-Z referenced some of his lyrics from the original Dead Presidents and he used the same sample but the sample was played in reverse and had a gloomy more atmospheric feel to it. The unfinished song was leaked onto the internet in the fall of 2007. Jay-Z finally recorded Dead Presidents 3 around the time of The Black Album but it was never completed. Nevertheless, the song is still a classic. This resulted in the video for the song and the actual song on the album to have completely different lyrics. However, it didn't actually appear on the album: a different version, with the same backing track and chorus but different lyrics, called "Dead Presidents II", appeared on Reasonable Doubt instead. Jay-Z - Dead Presidents 3 Dead Presidents is probably best remembered as the first single off of Jay-Z's debut album Reasonable Doubt. In either case, these are twenty Jay-Z songs you've (probably) never heard before. Some of the songs are early '90s demo cuts that made their way to the internet and others are features with artists that you may have forgotten about. Seeing as we recently shared with you twenty obscure Kanye West songs that you were probably unfamiliar with it only seems fair that Ye's "Big Brother" get the same treatment. Now, we're all familiar with Hov's biggest hit records - Hard Knock Life, Give It 2 Me, Encore, Empire State of Mind, Picasso Baby, etc - but today we're going to be looking at a few Jay-Z songs that you may not be familiar with. So him, Dame Dash and Kareem "Biggs" Burke put up their own money and started Roc-A-Fella Records. It's weird when you look back on it but during the early '90s Jay couldn't give his demo away. From his debut album Reasonable Doubt to his latest album Magna Carta Holy Grail. He has consistently shown and proven for the last twenty years. Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter is often considered the greatest rapper alive, and for good reason. He goes by many names: Young Hov, Hova The God, Jigga, Shawn Carter, but for most of us he is simply known as Jay-Z (and yes, there is a hyphen in his name, we don't care how trendy it is to not include it).