Jay-Z’s “Decoded” Book Cover Revealed

Top Stories | hiphopucit | September 22, 2010 at 2:05 pm

Every once in a while Jay will “say” something on his rarely-used social networking account. A few weeks ago a seemingly innocuous profile picture popped up, and a few heads wondered what that was about. Well, it turns out to be the cover to his upcoming book, Decoded, set to drop later this year. When Jay spoke to Rolling Stone back in June about it, here’s what he had to say:

…he talked about why he was reluctant to release the autobiographical work, even though it was completed several years ago. “It’s too much. For the book, I was interviewed, people close to me were interviewed. So I was learning a lot of things I didn’t know as a child,” Jay-Z told RS. “It’s not anything I haven’t said in the past, in songs. It’s just more detailed. A song is three minutes long. A book doesn’t have to rhyme, and it has no time limit, so you can say exactly how everything went.”

Jay-Z also admitted he was most affected by parts of Decoded that concerned his father, who abandoned the family when Jay-Z was 11. “It was still wrong, at the end of the day, but he did stick around at a time where it wasn’t particularly cool or popular,” Jay-Z said. “He married my mom at a time when guys were just leaving, and you’d never even meet your dad. So it made me ease up a little bit in how I felt about him.”