The Coolest Mogul

No flashbulbs go off when Jay-Z enters the small downstairs lobby of Soho House, an exclusive hangout looking down on Manhattan's trendy meatpacking district. In fact, no one really even notices the 6-foot-2 guy in droopy jeans and zip-up hoodie until coming face to face with him in the elevator. "Jay!" shrieks a surprised passenger. The passenger's with a shorter friend who's stunned into silence. If only they'd known they'd meet the premier music mogul, entrepreneur and hip-hop MC of their generation--they would've worn their good sneakers. The taller one chatters nervously about some club in Jersey, as his stout buddy's face settles into a frozen smile. Jay-Z puts them at ease with a few simple interjections. "Really?" "Yeah, that's cool." By the time they reach the fifth floor, the guys are comfortable enough to shake hands with him. They even give him a slap-on-the-back goodbye.

No civilian could ever get that close to Diddy--let alone dare touch him. But Jay-Z, a.k.a. Shawn Carter, is not your average hip-hop high roller. Carter, 36, is so conspicuously bling-free and so consistently pleasant that you wonder if he morphs into a megalomaniacal tyrant behind closed doors. At dinner--for which he's dressed in shell-toed Adidas, baggy Rocawear jeans and a Ferragamo blazer--he orders a $615 bottle of wine at dinner, then looks uncomfortable throughout the cork-sniffing/glass-swirling/tasting routine. He appears more laid-back than ambitious, more warm than studied, charismatic but not aggressive. He even raps in his own natural speaking voice--unlike almost any rapper you can think of. It's not that there's no distinction between the star and the man--it's that he navigates between them so gracefully.

There must be something burning beneath Carter's low-key exterior. How else does a high-school dropout from Brooklyn's roughest projects end up in Manhattan's swankiest executive suites? Carter is now worth an estimated $320 million, runs the seminal hip-hop label Def Jam and dates probably the hottest woman on the planet, Beyoncé Knowles. And he's got a brand-new CD about to come out--his 10th in 10 years--"Kingdom Come." It's his first since he "retired" as a rapper in 2003, and judging by the buzz, it should be one of his most successful. This month, in partnership with the United Nations, he appears in an MTV documentary about the water crisis in Africa. Whatever is at work in him, it's made him one of the most compelling figures in the music business.

Carter still sees himself as an outsider--the street-smart guy in the boardroom, the black man in a roomful of whites, the rapper convening with the secretary-general. "I don't look at myself as part of that executive club," he says. "I look at myself as the oddball who made it here. I'm sure all the other execs ask behind my back, 'How'd he get here?' I know my story's an uncommon story. I'm amazed at it still. I just played Poland and they knew all the words to my songs. Poland! They were singing the B-sides . I'm like, 'What is this? Who am I?' "

That's been the question at least since Carter was a teenager obsessed with rhyme and rapping. "Before I started recording I had this green notebook that I used to write in incessantly," he recalls. "I would walk through the Marcy projects, where everyone's playing basketball, with my notebook, and that was not a cool thing. You went to school because you had to, but you did not carry books." As a raw rapper, he couldn't get any label to give him a record deal, so in 1995 he and now-estranged business partner Damon Dash started Roc-A-Fella Records with Kareem Burke, and quickly established the label with seven multiplatinum Jay-Z albums in a row.

Carter's outsider intuition is redefining Def Jam's roster. He's proved adept at timing the label's releases, promoting records and finding talent. (Of course, his own records make money, too.) Since coming onboard two years ago, he's brought in Kanye West--offering hip-hop its newest hope--as well as the highly respected Roots, his old rival Nas and such lucrative discoveries as Young Jeezy, Ne-Yo and Rihanna. His oddest choice was the scrappy Lady Sovereign--white, British, rapping in barely decipherable slang--Britain's female Eminem. "Ah, the biggest little midget," he says with a smile. "Sometimes you gotta give the outsiders a chance."

Carter's been given a scary one at Def Jam. "It's the biggest hip-hop label of all time," he says. "If that thing falls apart, it's on my head. I was naive enough to believe I can do it." And according to Doug Morris, top executive of parent company Universal, "Jay's put Def Jam back on the map. Everything he touches gets cooler." Morris doesn't seem to mind that Carter's been concentrating his cool-making powers on ... Jay-Z. His collaborators on the new CD are the best in the business--West, Dr. Dre, Coldplay's Chris Martin--and Jay's wordplay is as inventive and associative as ever: "Sellin' blow in the park this is knowin' my heart/now I'm so enlightened I might glow in the dark/I been up in the office you might know him as Clark/ just when you thought the whole world fell apart I/Take off the blazer loosen up the tie/ Step inside the booth Superman is alive." It's clear why some people think he's hip-hop's greatest MC. "There has to come a day when I stop making records," he says over dinner. "I think it would have been easier 10 years ago, because even though I had the inclination and talent, I didn't love it passionately. I didn't love it like I do now."

He's so in love, in fact, that he's still messing with the tracks, only weeks before the record's release. In the limo on the way to the studio, he's already in a working trance, replaying and replaying five bothersome seconds; what's wrong is detectable only to him. Much of his success comes from such attention to detail--and a sense of how great a difference subtleties can make. This is why, he says, it's so hard to copy such true rap innovators such as OutKast. "You have to make 'Hey Ya!' with 100 percent integrity," he explains, as if he were using a PowerPoint flow chart to make himself clear. "There's very little margin of error in that song. If you miss it by half a degree, it's Weird Al Yankovic wacky karaoke music." Satisfied that he can remedy the problems he's heard, he flips on the radio and Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" comes shimmying out of his billion-dollar speaker system. Carter jokingly mimics her high notes, each with a little squeak and a laugh. It's the only time he acknowledges--and then only tacitly--their relationship.

"The funny thing," Carter says, "is that I never wanted to be famous. When I was making money dealing drugs, I had the sense of being famous before I was famous." Now that he's making megamoney--enough to own at least one Manhattan skyscraper and a stake in the New Jersey Nets basketball team--his next dream is to bring the Nets to his old 'hood. He's part of a $2.5 billion Brooklyn renovation project that includes moving the team to the borough and housing it in a Frank Gehry-designed stadium complex. Many area residents aren't happy about the prospect of more traffic and higher real-estate prices. "It's a switch for me to be on this development side of things," Carter says. "You just have to know in your heart that you're doing the right thing. What if there were a team in Brooklyn? It would bring so much pride--forget about it! I might cry the first day if it ever happens. You know how people from Brooklyn get about Brooklyn."

Not everyone buys into the idea of Jay-Z as regular guy and reluctant celebrity. When the veteran rapper and actor LL Cool J's last Def Jam record tanked, he cut loose backstage at the MTV awards: "I think Jay-Z does a very good job," he reportedly said. "Of promoting Jay-Z." Cool J will leave Def Jam after his next record. Anyone who thinks that Carter took on his job at Def Jam simply to be a nurturing mentor hasn't been paying attention. Though he'd had plenty of experience at Roc-A-Fella helping artists in and out of the studio as well as running a business, there's no doubt that Jay-Z is largely about expanding the Jay-Z brand. Those are his hands starring in the newest Hewlett-Packard laptop ad. (This may be closest HP will ever come to out-cooling Mac.) The first video off his new album debuted as part of a "Monday Night Football" Budweiser Select commercial.

One of Jay-Z's biggest challenges now is how to continue this march into the mainstream without losing his street appeal. Dash, the ex-partner who has since severed his ties with Jay-Z by selling his entire stake in Rocawear and Roc-A-Fella, ran into a suit-wearing Jay-Z in an elevator recently. He later told Rolling Stone, "I don't even know that guy anymore." But judging by the excitement around the new album--and all the kids who still wear Jay-Z's Rocawear clothes in clubs--he's still got his credibility. "We've seen rappers killed, or just fall off," says Island Def Jam chairman L. A. Reid. "Now we're watching the biggest rapper remain the biggest rapper. We've never seen this movie before." Amazingly, Carter has largely dodged the label of sellout. "The only backlash I feel is from being too big, you know?" he says. "It's not cool to like me. I get it--the gift of discovery is everything with the cutting-edge kids. But as far as the culture goes, I bring hip-hop where I go."

Including to the United Nations. Before his tour of Africa earlier this year, he wanted to do something to help the troubled continent, so he visited the United Nations, learned that the mounting water crisis was a top priority and approached the secretary-general. It's unlikely that Kofi Annan worried about the issue of Carter's street cred when they met, but the secretary-general certainly knew that people under 30 are more likely to listen to Jay-Z than Kofi-A. The result of their meeting is the new MTV documentary called "The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life." Carter traveled to impoverished villages throughout Africa, bringing with him the gift of clean water. "I've given money and written checks," he says, "but when you're on the ground and you turn on the faucet and the village get water for the first time, it's like nothing else."

But even movers and shakers get tired. Tonight, in the car on the way home after another long day, Carter looks exhausted. He's been up since 5, done three radio interviews and a photo shoot, and made, give or take, a million executive decisions. It's now 10:30 p.m., and he still has to go over some final album tracks when he gets home. He spots a copy of GQ tucked in the back of the seat. "You know I got voted 'Man's Man'?" He rubs his closely shaved head. "I was number ten, Clooney was number one. I'm not sure what magazine it was, all I know is that I'm a manly man," he says, flexing an arm and laughing. Carter's laughter is clearly spontaneous: his voice often cracks like a kid's. It seems improbable that someone with so much ambition could be so uncalculatedly endearing. So is that what the calculation is--that 100 percent integrity is the slickest move of all?