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“It’s not, like, ‘We’re here! We’re balling harder than everybody,’ ” he says. “It’s like, ‘I’m shocked that we’re here.’ Still being amazed, still not being jaded. Having so much fun and then stopping and saying, ‘What are we doing here? How did we get here?’ “

The key line, Jay says, is the one that goes If you escaped what I escaped, you’d be in Paris getting fucked up too.

“I’ve known so many people that didn’t make it,” he says. “Most people can look at a picture of the kids they grew up with and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah—Adam went away to Harvard.’ This is a whole different conversation.”

Nearly every rapper tells a version of that story. But nobody tells it better or to a wider cross section of the population—children, rap nerds, corporate America—than Jay-Z. No hip-hop artist who owes his credibility to the street has moved farther beyond it and into the rarefied air of twenty-first-century high society than Jay has.