HARD TRUTHS

“SEE, that’s Fort Greene right there, the projects, and I went to school right here -- this is George Westinghouse,” says Jay-Z, looking through the window of his gray Rolls-Royce as it chauffeurs him into his past.

“Marcy Projects is about five minutes straight down,” he says, pointing east toward the housing development where he lived as a youth. “See that? That’s one thing I liked about going to school here,” he adds with a smile, indicating a road sign that reads “Jay St.”

Jay-Z, 37, doesn’t return often to this Brooklyn neighborhood, where he grew up as Shawn Corey Carter. Stardom and wealth have taken him away to a Manhattan home and the globe-trotting life of a hip-hop star and major-label record executive.

It’s his role as a recording artist that’s brought him back on a warm fall day, to rehearse for a taping of the “VH1 Storytellers” show on a soundstage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As the car inches through late afternoon traffic, past the courts where he used to play basketball and the corners where he once sold drugs, he finds that his emotions are stirred.

“Yeah, man, it’s the place that made me,” he says softly.

As it happens, Jay-Z’s physical homecoming parallels the artistic journey he made on his new album, “American Gangster,” which comes out Tuesday.

Until recently, he had no plans to make a record, but when he got an early look at the movie “American Gangster,” starring Denzel Washington as 1970s Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas, he was immediately inspired to create an album based on the film.

Sort of.

“The album is not about the film,” explains the rapper, who completed the collection in a typically fast three weeks. “It connected with me on an emotional level. It was so similar to the neighborhoods that I came up in, and things that happened there. And Denzel’s character as well . . . you know, his laid-back persona, that’s pretty much how I am.

“It’s really about the emotions of that life. I would take an emotion that I felt was important, or things that resonated with me . . . and make a song.

“But none of the emotions are current emotions. I mean, success is, because that’s the thing that I’ve dealt with, but none of the songs are currently how I feel now. . . . It’s like writing a book, going back to all these things, these emotions that I thought were buried. Because as a person you grow and you add layers on who you become. So I never thought that I would get back to that place.

“I didn’t just want to go back to that place because it’s the cool, popular thing to do. That seemed reckless to me. I think when you achieve a certain level of success, your job as a person who’s reached the top of your field is to push it further -- try new, different things so people won’t be afraid to. Not to play down.”

Keeping it rolling

The car parks in the Navy Yard, now a busy business and industrial complex, and Jay-Z strolls toward the soundstage, dressed casually in loose jeans, white Nikes and a black “Crooks From Hell” T-shirt with a cartoonish design of a masked man behind bars.

He has a hug or a friendly fist-tap for crew members and other workers inside the building as his band warms up, but along with the easygoing approachability is an unmistakable air of stardom.

He wears that quality easily too. He’s accustomed to it after a decade of consistent popularity, an unusually long run in the hip-hop world. He’s sold around 25 million albums in the U.S., and such collections as “Reasonable Doubt” (from 1996), “The Blueprint” (2001) and “The Black Album” (2003) are among the consensus classics in the hip-hop canon.

Along with such common hip-hop perks as a clothing line, the success has also helped him win a girlfriend named Beyonce and, in 2004, the title of president and chief executive of Def Jam Recordings, the iconic rap label that’s now part of the Universal Music Group and the home of such artists as Kanye West, Nas, Chingy and Beanie Sigel.

His track record in that office has been mixed, but all the old-line music companies are struggling these days, and at least he can point to the breaking of four new artists -- Rihanna, Young Jeezy, Rick Ross and Ne-Yo.

As an artist, Jay-Z’s taste for the unpredictable led to a 2004 collaboration with Los Angeles rock band Linkin Park. A writing collaboration with Coldplay’s Chris Martin on last year’s “Kingdom Come” was less notable, and the album, which ended a three-year retirement, was the lowest-selling and worst-reviewed of his career, with much criticism directed toward his lyrics about luxury products and exclusive resorts.

Jay-Z dismisses the concerns, claiming to be proud of the work and satisfied with the sales of about 1.5 million. But as he gets ready to run through the seven new songs he’ll perform on “Storytellers” (the show will be shown Thursday on VH1), you get the feeling he wouldn’t mind making a point.

Jay-Z puts on pair of sunglasses and joins the band, which will back him at the next day’s taping and also on a rare, if short, concert tour that begins at the House of Blues in West Hollywood on Tuesday.

Sliding his rap easily into the soul-music groove of “Pray,” he sounds commanding as he delivers the album’s first full song, spoken by a young man preparing to enter the game.

“Everywhere there’s oppression the drug profession flourishes like beverages,” he raps with his distinctive combination of force and fluidity. “Refreshing sweet taste of sin / Everything I seen made me everything I am.”

The appetite for his “American Gangster” album has been intensified by the unusual nature of the project and by its attachment to the highly anticipated movie. And from the sound of the songs he’s rehearsing, the challenge and the subject have inspired his most powerful work since those early landmarks.

The three-act saga is built on samples from the 1970s, the movie’s time frame. Devised largely by Sean “Diddy” Combs’ production team the Hitmen, it goes beyond the obvious Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Isley Brothers and Curtis Mayfield sources to include the work of lesser-known but potent artists such as the Wichita group Rudy Love & the Love Family, Florida soul guitarist Little Beaver and upstate New York funk brigade Larry Ellis & the Black Hammer.

“I think the truth is timeless,” Jay-Z said earlier in the car. “I mean, the music is ‘70s soul samples, but the emotions are forever. The truth goes across all boundaries and all time, I believe.

“I think the reason I’ve been able to have such a long career and still garner the kind of attention I can right now is because there’s truth there. People relate to that. And whether the truth is about an island in St. Tropez or is about Marcy Projects, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the truth.”

Taking care of business

Jay-Z’s Brooklyn excursion comes at the end of a day at the Universal Music Group’s midtown Manhattan headquarters. Stepping from the 27th-floor suite of Island Def Jam Music Group Chairman L.A. Reid, where the two have been meeting to discuss release schedules and plans for “American Gangster,” he walks to his office to collect a few items, chatting with employees and bumming a stick of gum from one.

“You know where we’re going, right?” he says to the driver, settling into the back seat and opening a takeout container of salad. “If you could stop at a store and grab me a water?”

He says it’s been a good day, not too hectic, and he seems relaxed as he eats his late lunch and talks about his passion: hip-hop. He gives every topic serious thought and laughs easily, but he maintains a certain reserve, looking straight ahead or out the window as he speaks.

What he sees on the New York streets is a vibrant culture that’s been moving to the rhythms and imagery of hip-hop for nearly three decades. That reign is now being questioned, as the genre’s CD sales have fallen even more sharply than those of pop music overall, and the bold artistry that made it a significant social and aesthetic force seems in short supply.

“It’s just the way of the world,” Jay-Z says of the sales decline. “Our fans are younger, so our fans live on computers. Other genres still have an adult audience, and as adults we’re not stealing music off the Internet. We’ll pay for the convenience of not having to wait for it to download, right? We will go to the store and actually pay for it just so we won’t have to deal with that.

“Kids, they’re on there all the time. . . . I think the consumption of hip-hop is the same, if not higher. It’s just not happening with sales.”

As a label head, he’s faced with the challenge of dealing with that reality, and solutions remain elusive. He’s more confident about hip-hop’s creative potential, even at a time when radio is dominated by disposable party jams with ambitions the size of ring-tones.

“Yeah, that’s affecting society as well, just in general,” he says. “Everybody wants a quick fix. But everything is not microwaveable. You have to invest into an entire work. That’s one of the reasons I’m proud of the album that I made, that it’s a complete piece of work. . . . Going about it like that in these times may not be the smartest thing to do, but I think it’s necessary.

“We have to mine it creatively and get back to being that voice, that social voice, a voice for oppressed people everywhere. I think as we grew we got away from some of those things, but that’s natural. . . . It’s growing pains. We’ll get there.

“Kanye West is doing a fantastic job at it. . . . You got OutKast, you have Dr. Dre, you have Eminem, you have Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse and their whole thing. Those artists have to put out albums, because people emulate success. You just got to make great music. We’ll figure out the model and let the chips fall where they may after that. But great music still sells.”

His salad is gone and the car is in Brooklyn now, the place that made him. He seems amused when he’s asked what kind of kid he was, and when he smiles his round features give him the look of a little boy.

“I was a great kid. Very happy, a little shy. A reserved and even-keel kid. . . . I’m still even-keel for the most part, but I didn’t like being shy at all. So I told myself I didn’t like being shy. . . . I like saying what’s on my mind.”

That personality adjustment led to trouble, though. Soon he was out on these street corners selling drugs to customers who pulled up in their cars. “It’s just how you grow up and the things that you see,” he says. “For the most part, growing up where I grew up you don’t see doctors and lawyers walking around. There’s no one to emulate but drug dealers. They’re the only successful people in the neighborhood. They’re 18 years old, driving better cars than your father, and you’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ ”

In “Pray,” which he calls a tale of lost innocence, he transforms those memories into simple but vivid verses: “As I head to my homeroom I observe the ruins / Dope needles on the ground / I hear a car go vroom / Drug dealer in the BM with the top down.”

As he fires out the words onstage during the rehearsal, his band bathing his images in vibrant washes of soul-shaded hip-hop, Jay-Z seems reconnected with his deepest roots, speaking again to the kids on the street:

“I ain’t choose this life, this life chose me.”

richard.cromelin@latimes.com