"He can't retire. Watch that dude come back like Jordan a few years later."
"Hopefully, not as bad."

That was the basic gist of every conversation me, my friends, and classmates had as the news of Jay-Z's The Black Album being his last began to spread. I had been a Jay-Z fan ever since I heard Hard Knocks Life (I hadn't heard any of Reasonable Doubt till my late high school years), and the idea of one of my favorite artists no longer making any music seemed foreign to me. In my world of music, you didn't stop until you died. Hell, not even imprisonment stopped the rapper Shine for the first few years and Kanye rapped "Through The Wire." But it was "official," Jay-Z was moving on to bigger and better prospects in his quest to become the next generation's Diddy in terms of money, fame, and business. I'm not ashamed ot admit it, "Encore" got me a little choked up when I first heard it. I could remember drives home from school with Jay-Z playing through the van's speakers while everyone else who took the vans home sung along to whatever his next single was. "Girls, Girls, Girls," "Song Cry," and "Renegade" just to name a few.

But one video that sticks in my mind to this day during all the hoopla was Jay-Z's "99 Problems." I hadn't heard the song until this video had premiered and I had caught it simply by chance but it's depiction of Brooklyn, the city I grew up in and was currently residing in caught my attention from the moment the camera panned up those subway steps. The black and white tone, the gritty beat, and Jay-Z's signature "freestyle" sounding flow would be the image I thereafter attributed to Jay-Z whenever he came to mind. No one can forget the infamous scene of Jay-Z being gunned down, representing the death of Jay-Z as we knew it and the rebirth not as a business man but a business. Of course, he would come back a few years later, but we didn't know that at the time. So far as we knew, this was it and we had to get it while the getting was good. Sold out seats and concerts, friends bragging about seeing him play for the "last" time, and the plastic that just took way too long to unwrap from the album: these are memories that I won't forget and this video brings back this time in my life quicker than anything else.