All posts tagged: JayZs

Jay-Z’s Afro Required 6 Days of Work

Jay-Z’s Afro Required 6 Days of Work

Published by Jenni Sidey

After seven long years, Jay-Z has returned to the stage, headlining The Roots’ annual music festival Roots Picnic in Philadelphia over the weekend. And what better way to mark the significance of his return performing than by debuting a new look: a lush, full combed-out afro. Since growing out his hair around his 4:44 album era, Hov’s freeform locs became as iconic as his catalog of rap classics. Inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom Jay had considered to be his spiritual predecessor (“It ain’t hard to tell, I’m the new Jean-Michel,” he raps in “Picasso Baby”), his locs became a signature during each of his public appearances. The years of growth and maintenance of the locs is why it took six days to comb them out into the afro that you see on the stage, according to natural hairstylist Letisia “Lety” Ravelo, who’s worked with the Carter family for years. And given Beyonce has her own line of haircare products, Cécred, it would make sense that Ravelo would use the concoctions on Jay. “We used all …

Reasonable Doubt at 30: Revisiting Jay-Z’s Hustler Masterpiece in His Billionaire Era

Reasonable Doubt at 30: Revisiting Jay-Z’s Hustler Masterpiece in His Billionaire Era

Published by Jenni Sidey

For the two decades following Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z dominated music and culture. During one eight-year period within that stretch, he released eight albums, six of which went to number one. His hit songs and collaborations were omnipresent: “Big Pimpin’,” “99 Problems,” “Crazy in Love,” “Umbrella,” “Empire State of Mind,” “N-ggas in Paris.” With cofounders Dash and Burke, he sold half of Roc-A-Fella Records for a large sum to Def Jam Recordings in 1997, and the other half for a much larger sum seven years later. From January 2005 to December 2007, he was the president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings, a tenure that was not without some complications, but also not without some notable successes (for example, kick-starting the careers of Rihanna and Ne-Yo). He became the face of the Brooklyn Nets, a publicly redeemed family man, the owner of the streaming platform Tidal, and a cognac and Champagne mogul. As an example of his cultural influence, in the fall of 2003, he released “Change Clothes,” the first single from The Black Album, at …

Inside Jay-Z’s World-Class Watch Collection

Inside Jay-Z’s World-Class Watch Collection

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the late 1990s, Jay-Z was ushered into a vault room at an unspecified location—“one of these buildings I didn’t know existed,” as he mysteriously describes it—and reemerged with an exceedingly rare Audemars Piguet watch. This is the type of person Jay has been for decades: a man for whom the doors of top secret vaults swing open like they’ve just been doused with WD-40. So, not long afterward, when he and his crew were initially refused entry to a jewelry store in a ski resort town, it came as a shock. “I don’t have enough eyes to watch all of them,” Jay remembers the shopkeeper saying. Right then, a couple—white, of course, and dressed for the slopes—rang the boutique’s bell and got a different answer. Once the couple were allowed in, Jay-Z and his group couldn’t be kept out. “Now the store’s open, everyone’s opening drawers, and we want to see, too, so we’re looking over their shoulders,” Jay says. When the other customer took off the watch he was wearing in order to …

Rashid Johnson, the Artist Who Shot Jay-Z’s GQ Cover, Drew Inspiration From the Harlem Renaissance

Rashid Johnson, the Artist Who Shot Jay-Z’s GQ Cover, Drew Inspiration From the Harlem Renaissance

Published by Jenni Sidey

Jay-Z discovered the work of Chicago-born artist Rashid Johnson—whose paintings, installations, and photographs often represent Black intellectual life—about a decade ago, says Johnson, when the hip-hop mogul was assembling his personal art collection. The admiration was mutual. “Jay’s music, lyricism, and sophistication are very much in line with a lot of interesting and historically important Black thinkers,” says Johnson, who places Jay-Z in a lineage alongside Harold Cruse, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Michael Eric Dyson. Johnson’s own fascination with Black intellectualism began when he was a child, sparked by a copy of Cruse’s 1967 work The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual perched on his mother’s bookshelf. (The volume later appeared in the artist’s 2024 solo Guggenheim exhibition, Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, a multidisciplinary showcase on Black consciousness.) The title alone sent his 10-year-old mind spiraling—as he told The New Yorker in 2024, “I remember thinking, What is this crisis, and what the hell am I expected to do about it?” For GQ’s April 2026 issue, Johnson turns his lens to an indelible …

The Best Watches of Super Bowl LX, From Bad Bunny’s New Royal Oak to Jay-Z’s Platinum Patek

The Best Watches of Super Bowl LX, From Bad Bunny’s New Royal Oak to Jay-Z’s Platinum Patek

Published by Jenni Sidey

Depending on your personal loyalties, the trouncing the Patriots received last night at the hands of the Seahawks may well have overshadowed the spectacular pageantry of the halftime show. But if you were there for the music, the commercials, and especially the watches, you were well served. If you paid close attention to the wedding scene during Bad Bunny’s performance, you might have noticed a sparkly new timepiece on his wrist (and it wasn’t the immaculate Cartier Crash he wore to the Super Bowl LX press conference last week). Indeed, the ink was barely dry on the press release for Audemars Piguet’s recent mega-drop of new watches when the Puerto Rican superstar performed in front of some 125 million people. Debuting last week in Andermatt, the Royal Oak Selfwinding with malachite dial is available in both 37mm and 41mm versions, and the former appeared beneath the cuff of Bunny’s white Zara suit. A sequel of sorts to the turquoise versions introduced in 2023, it boasts a yellow gold case with the Royal Oak’s signature integrated …