This article deals with rap music and with two distinct discourses in which rap artists habitually engage. It also deals with the way that one, in these, can find a dialectic between the special and the mundane, between succeeding—makin' it—and remaining loyal to the values of your community or culture—keeping it real. Furthermore, it deals with how the rap star Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter handles this dialectic, positing entrepreneurship as both a politics and an ethic, and how we, by reading his lyrics, are led to some forgotten localities in academic research—the disenfranchised, urban, marginalized, entrepreneurial “’hood.”
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