The Jay-Z
«Hustlas we don't sleep, we rest one eye up» from Jay-Z - December 4th
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Personal >> 99 Problems of Jay-Z99 Problems of Jay-Z
No less famous became "99 Problems", which was performed by Jay-Z at the Staff Ball before the inauguration of Barack Obama. This ball was arranged for 4,000 people, who worked for the election campaign and took place on the 21st of January of 2009. The lyrics was changed a little to suit the atmosphere of the situation, therefore the whole crowd sang together about the 99 problems they have, "but a Bush ain't one"
When the song was released it reached #12 in the UK singles chart. 99 Problems became unavoidable hit for several years and 4 years later it entered the list again where it was on the 35th position because Jay-Z came to Britain to summer music festivals. One of them is Glasto or Glastonbury, one of the biggest music festivals of the world, and festival, which takes place in Hyde Park, called the Wireless Festival.
The video to this song appeared in 2004 in April. The director was Mark Romanek. Made in black and white, the video shows scenes from the life of New York and Brooklyn in particular. All critics assessed it highly. One of them is famous New York critic Armond White. This music video was nominated for 4 Music Video Production Association awards (MVPA Awards) held since 1992 and won three of them. When nominated for VMAs (MTV Video Music Awards, established to celebrate the best music videos of the year and to be an alternative to Grammy Awards), it won Best Director, Best Rap Video, Best Cinematography and Best Editing rewards.
It received nominations as well for Best Male Video and Video of the Year. The only criticism came from the Humane Society of the US, the biggest animal advocacy organization. It considered that there was praising of dog fighting in it. Video contains the scene how Jay-Z is shot with numerous bullets. Sometimes this scene is removed by the networks as they consider it has violent content. Some left it unchanged but with explanation why they think that this scene is important. For instance, MTV aired introduction with John Norris, who was a MTV reporter. The explanation was made by Jay-Z also to the Black Entertainment Television where he said that it was just like Jay-Z's "death" with Shawn Carter's "rebirth".
Many mashups followed later with this song. Linkin Park, for instance, did one putting it with their songs on the album "Collusion Course". And when Jay-Z performs it, he frequently integrates the riff of "Back in Black", a song of AC/DC. 3 million copies of Black Album were sold in the USA only.
The retirement party of Jay-Z was the concert at Madison Square Garden on November, 25, 2003. This final performance where Jay-Z announced his plans to retire from the music industry was looked closely upon in the documentary "Fade to Black". The film is dedicated to the career of this hip-hop artist though other famous personalities are also mentioned in the film. Jay-Z also tried to show in this film the source of his inspiration. Money earned there was sent on charity.
Then the collaboration with rock band Linkin Park followed over the album Collision Course as was mentioned already and over the DVD. One of the songs which appeared after that was "Numb/Encore". This single was the most successful as it reached the 20th position in the Billboard Hot 100 by February of 2005. It combined the song of Jay-Z "Encore", which was taken from the "Black Album", and "Numb", the song from the album "Meteora" (Linkin Park).
Though in the UK Singles Chart it didn't reach the top 10, the record of most durable stay in the top 20 was achieved. The highest position it took was #14, but 53 weeks it remained in the chart and about 13 weeks the song remained in the top20.
The video for it received MTV award in summer of 2005. A year later at Grammy Awards it was marked as a Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. It was a real surprise when suddenly during the performance Paul McCartney came out to the stage and joined the lead vocalist of Linkin Park Chester Bennington to sing famous "Yesterday" together with him. It was inserted instead of the song "Numb" following the rap verse.
Soon after that Jay-Z took the position of Def Jam Records President. At the same time he continued his work in Roc-A-Fella. The collaboration in the course of many years with Dash and Biggs came to an end. This split caused much discussion in mass media and multiple interviews in which Dash said that he felt rather offended with Jay-Z. The exchange of accusations to each other was covered by many journalists and bloggers.