Memphis Bleek joins Boardroom’s On Record to revisit The Understanding, Roc-A-Fella’s golden era, Jay-Z’s mentorship, Kanye West, Just Blaze, and more.
In the year 2000, Roc-A-Fella Records was the most dominant force in rap. The label was so powerful its own artists used to joke they could put a chain on anybody, push him out, and watch him go gold in a week. They changed the way people dressed and talked, and thanks to a roster of in-house producers that included Just Blaze, Bink!, and a then-unknown Kanye West, they changed the way rap sounded. Jay-Z sat at the top of it. And right next to him, since he was 15 years old, stood Memphis Bleek.
Bleek was the first artist Jay ever signed. The kid from his own building in Marcy. The one being prepped, in plain sight, as the next man up. His debut, Coming of Age, went gold in 1999, and by his own account that wasn’t the win it looked like from the outside. A gold album was the floor. The next one was supposed to be the leap — harder, grimier, bigger than anything he’d done. The record that would prove he was more than Jay-Z’s lil’ man.
That record was The Understanding, and the story of how it got made is wilder than the album ever let on. The beats came together at Baseline Studios, the Roc’s clubhouse, where nobody booked time because nobody ever left. It was the same room where Bleek met Kanye and Just Blaze for the first time — the same session, he says, that accidentally kicked off Jay’s Dynasty and Beanie Sigel‘s The Truth. The single everyone credits to his work with Timbaland, “Is That Your Chick,” was a Jay-Z record first, handed to Bleek with the verses already written. And the song he’d planned as his lead single got taken off his hands entirely when Jay heard it and put it on Dynasty instead.
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The album came out in December 2000 and debuted at No. 1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. It went gold in five weeks. And Bleek barely got to feel any of it. His older brother — the man who raised him, who taught him the world — had a near-fatal motorcycle accident in Miami, and Bleek spent the next two years in a hospital instead of on a tour bus. He never toured behind the biggest record of his life.
Twenty-six years later, he came by Boardroom to talk about all of it: the era, the beats that got away, the brotherhood, and what it actually means to make the leap when the man whose shadow you’re trying to step out of is also the one holding the door. This is the story of The Understanding. This is On Record.
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