Beanie Sigel (right) says that meeting Jay-Z was like meeting the perfect hustler. Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

Earlier this year, VH1, the music-video channel, broadcast a television series called “Bands on the Run.” Four rock groups were sent on tour, competing to see which one could sell the most merchandise; the winner would get a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of new equipment, fifty thousand dollars in cash, a VH1-financed video, and a showcase concert with industry executives. The bands weren’t very good, but the animosity of the competition was entertaining. In one episode, a group called Soulcracker started a grassroots smear campaign, telling fans that a victory for the rival group Flickerstick would be a victory for “corporate rock.” It was an absurd claim—both bands were, after all, angling for a corporate contract, on a corporate television show—and the insult backfired: Flickerstick demanded an apology, and got one. The next week, Flickerstick won the competition.

What’s funny about the insult is how old-fashioned it seems. The term “corporate rock” is a relic of the nineteen-seventies, popularized by critics who felt that the big record companies had coöpted a rebellious, authentic genre for mass consumption. In 1978, the rock journalist Lester Bangs wrote, “The music business today still must be recognized as by definition an enemy, if not the most crucial enemy, of music and the people who try to perform it honestly.” Over the past ten years, though, “corporate rock” has been upstaged by “corporate rap,” which has emerged as the country’s new music. Rappers are responsible for three of the country’s ten most popular albums, and the Recording Industry Association of America estimates that last year rap music generated more than $1.8 billion in sales, accounting for 12.9 per cent of all music purchases; it has surpassed country music as the nation’s second most popular genre, after rock and roll. The obscure rap record labels Fo’ Reel and Hypnotize Minds have teamed up with the media conglomerates Vivendi Universal and Sony, respectively, and have found millions of customers. Rappers, with a few notable exceptions, are black men, but their listeners are not: about seventy per cent of the people who buy rap albums are white, and an increasingly large percentage are female. “Hip-hop,” once a noun, has become an adjective, constantly invoked, if rarely defined; people talk about hip-hop fashion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball. Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a movement and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe almost anything that’s supposed to appeal to young people.

What’s most unexpected about this boom is the reaction of the rappers themselves, who rose to prominence as icons of rebellion and authenticity. They have not only accepted corporate rap but embraced it. Like Frank Sinatra before them, they are chairmen of the board: Fortune put the rapper Master P on its cover in 1999, after he branched out into film production, sports management, and fashion, and today’s biggest rap acts, from OutKast to Snoop Dogg, are diversifying, leveraging their popularity to create their own companies. Eminem may deliver antisocial lyrics, but as a businessman he’s a model citizen, an entrepreneur who recently put his solo career on hold so he could build up his new imprint, Shady Records.

The greatest of the corporate rappers is Jay-Z, a thirty-one-year-old tycoon from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He has all the necessary credentials: a record label (Roc-A-Fella Records), a clothing company (Rocawear), a production house (Roc-A-Fella Films). What’s more, he has the right sensibility: nonchalant, devious, witty. He has put out five successful albums in five years—the only rapper to have done so—starting with “Reasonable Doubt,” his début, in 1996, and he’s sold more than eleven million records. Many rappers have made money, and lots of it, but none have rapped so eloquently about making money, or about the lure of wealth and ambition. Jay-Z has succeeded by treating hip-hop above all as a corporate enterprise, by embracing ruthless professionalism as his guiding aesthetic. As he once put it, “What y’all about to witness is big business, kid.”

I met Jay-Z for the first time this spring, in Los Angeles. He was in town for the Soul Train Music Awards (he’d been named male entertainer of the year), and I spent a day watching him rehearse and shop for sneakers at a nearby mall. There was a constant procession of well-wishers and autograph-seekers, and he greeted most of them wordlessly, with faint smiles and loose handclasps. Jay-Z is not flamboyant in the way that rappers are expected to be flamboyant. He doesn’t have a gimmick, or an outlandish persona, or an especially fancy wardrobe. He usually wears a T-shirt and jeans, invariably made by Rocawear. He’s tall and lanky. His hair is shaved barbershop-close, and there is the hint of a goatee on his chin. Diamond earrings and a diamond pendant are the only indications of his fortune and, indirectly, his fame.

Jay-Z was born Shawn Corey Carter in 1969. He grew up in the Marcy City Housing Projects, a forbidding bastion in Bedford-Stuyvesant; he has turned the project name into a hip-hop brand name. (At a recent concert in Washington, D.C., he was introduced with the words “Marcy projects, y’all!”) He was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls, and was brought up by his mother, Gloria; his father left the family when Jay-Z was eleven. Jay-Z is among the few rappers who memorize rhymes without committing them to paper, but he says that as a kid he always kept a green notebook with him. “I used to write in it every day, at my mom’s house, banging on the table and saying my raps,” he says. When an older neighbor called Big Jaz got a record deal, Jay-Z left George Westinghouse Technical High School to become his sidekick. “He took me to London, and I was, like, ‘People pay you? To make raps? Oh, shit!’ ” After a few years, when it was clear that Big Jaz would never become a major rap star, Jay-Z left him to tour with Big Daddy Kane, a popular rapper whose career was beginning to decline.

Jay-Z returned to Brooklyn, where, he says, he spent his early twenties selling crack cocaine. He is vague about the specifics. “I was running the streets,” he told me, and that’s about as far as he would go. In song, he’s more forthcoming:

I took trips with so much shit in the whip that if the cops pulled us over, the dog would get sick.

In 1995, after Jay-Z was shot at from six feet away, he decided to give rapping another try. A producer named Clark Kent introduced him to Damon Dash, a Harlem entrepreneur who had contacts in the rap industry, but no one was interested in signing Jay-Z. His old songs were considered too “sophisticated,” he told me. “You had to really like rap to be, like, ‘This dude’s clever: the way he’s using his words, the way he tackles his subjects—that’s different.’ ” So Jay-Z and Dash, along with a silent partner, Kareem (Biggs) Burke, formed Roc-A-Fella Records, to put out Jay-Z’s music themselves. Roc-A-Fella eventually struck a distribution deal with Priority Records (which it later left for Island/Def Jam), and issued Jay-Z’s first album, “Reasonable Doubt,” in 1996. A cheerful, filthy love song called “Ain’t No Nigga” became his first hit; it also launched the career of Foxy Brown, who rapped as Jay-Z’s girlfriend.