Jay said that toward the end of his drug-dealing days “it was harder for me to just walk away. I had to really make a hard decision and say I’m going to try to make this music work. I was trying to do both. Nothing good comes when you’re dabbling in both of those worlds. I didn’t have any success in the beginning [with music] because I didn’t commit fully. I need to commit fully to something or it just won’t work.” When Jay committed fully to music, at first he couldn’t get a record deal. He and his then partner, promoter Damon Dash, formed Roc-a-Fella Records and went through a few independent record companies before signing with Def Jam. Early in his career, when he’d achieved some notoriety, he was involved in a nightclub altercation that resulted in an arrest for assault. Today, he says, “I did wrong and I paid. You’ve got to realize where I’m coming from; we fought all the time. It’s just what you did. You went to the club; you had fights; sometimes bottles got thrown, sometimes knives came out. You know how many times I had that sort of fight? I still had the bravado of the same guy I was, and I had to realize that I wasn’t that same guy anymore.”

But, he acknowledges, “you enter the room, your résumé enters with you. So [even now] every time I enter a room, it’s still that thing of: ‘That’s Jay Z—he used to be the drug dealer from Marcy Projects.’ But I have great people around me. I have family and friends and a strong foundation around me. Everything else, everything outside of who you really care about or who you really connect to, people’s perceptions of you, is just noise. You can’t pay attention to the noise, or live your life by the gossip columns, because it’ll drive you crazy.”

I asked Jay a lot of questions about rumors that he has not previously talked about—rumors that fit into what he calls the “noise” category. His trip to Cuba last April, for example, when he and Beyoncé were criticized for having had some sort of special White House clearance to get into that country. (President Obama even said, jokingly, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “I’ve got 99 problems and now Jay Z is one.”) According to Jay, “No one has to get White House clearance to go to Cuba; it was just a news story for that week. What we did was not unusual. The restaurant we went to [there] was filled with people’s pictures. When I tell you everyone’s been to this restaurant—I’m not going to say who—but the walls are littered with pictures of celebrities. They don’t bother anybody … so why was it us? It was just the timing. I think news stories now, sadly, are not about the news. They’re about ratings; they’re about hooks. So they found a hook: Obama’s buddies go to Cuba, bang, and they found a way to tie these two together. You notice the people that first came out [about this] were Republicans.”

As for Beyoncé’s not really having been pregnant with their first child, Jay says, “I don’t even know how to answer that. It’s just so stupid. You know, I felt dismissive about it, but you’ve got to feel for her. I mean, we’ve got a really charmed life, so how can we complain? But when you think about it, we’re still human beings. And this is a time like … forget Beyoncé, forget the person—a mother carrying her first child, and this is the thing they have to deal with? Certain things should be off-limits. I have thick skin, I understand; I go outside, you want to take my picture, fine. But there should be some kind of human-decency boundaries. This is a mother with a child. And even in hip-hop, all the blogs—they had a field day with it. I’m like, We come from you guys, we represent you guys. Why are you perpetuating this? Why are you adding fuel to this ridiculous rumor?”