Jay-Z decoded

From selling crack cocaine as a teenage hustler to becoming one of America’s richest rappers, Jay-Z writes about his life, and explains hip-hop culture in his literary debut Decoded.

From selling crack cocaine as a teenage hustler to becoming one of America’s richest rappers, Jay-Z writes about his life, and explains hip-hop culture in his literary debut Decoded, which released in New York recently.

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The New York City native writes in the sometimes coarse language of the Brooklyn streets where he grew up, explaining how hip-hop was his generation's way of telling the world what it was like to grow up in an urban "wartime”.

"I lost people I loved... felt the breeze of bullets flying by my head. I saw crack addiction destroy families — it almost destroyed mine — but I sold it, too," Jay-Z, writes in

Decoded

.