Eric Adams’s relationship with hip-hop highlights the genre’s generational divide: New York’s younger, less-established rappers have a connection to City Hall that’s strained at best. Adams has blamed drill music in particular as the reason behind the deaths of two New York rappers, and urged platforms to remove drill music videos. Younger rappers would likely never want to be seen as affiliated with a mayor who once worked for the NYPD (who have been the primary antagonists of hip-hop as a genre for most of its existence). They maintain the genre’s historical wariness of authority, and particularly of law enforcement. 

But rappers of Adams’s generation, like Jay-Z or Diddy, see themselves more as moguls than artists. Those who have made it may have once hated cops just as much as their younger counterparts, but many have sanded their musician edges and rebranded as barons of liquor, NFTs, and podcasts. They now see “the system” less like a power that must be fought and more like the last walled garden that they must infiltrate and enmesh themselves within. That attitude might be relatable to Adams, who began his career in the NYPD seeing himself as an activist infiltrator, only to entrench himself within the establishment. 

So, when Jay-Z accepted an award from Adams in September 2023 at the Brooklyn Public Library, the handshake between the two men was a culmination of their parallel transformations  from agitators to insiders. That may have satisfied Adams—who frequently uses “Empire State of Mind” as walkout music—but what exactly does Jay-Z get from all this? When Hell Gate reached out to the Mayor’s Office, they told us “the award was to acknowledge the philanthropic and cultural commitments from both [Jay-Z] and his mother Gloria Carter.” It’s true that Jay-Z had agreed to donate over $1 million to the library, right after his company Roc Nation turned BPL into a shrine to his life and career for the better part of the summer—strangely, without his knowledge, according to his employees at Roc Nation.

If you like what you’re reading, become a subscriber.

Sign up for our newsletters:

If Jay-Z wasn’t crazy about getting all this attention in the first place, why show up and hobnob with Adams and other local politicians? Other members of his aging cohort of mogul rappers from the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, like Harlem’s Jim Jones and the Bronx’s KRS One, have lent their faces and names to the Adams administration in an effort to promote their own new albums or projects (with many of their own demographic now making up Adams’s voting base.) Jay-Z doesn’t need the money like the other rappers: He’s got money in successful champagne and cognac brands, a streaming service, the NFL, and of course, real estate.

If anything, the BPL ceremony was a grace note; the real symbol of Jay-Z’s status as New York City powerbroker sits not even a mile up Flatbush Avenue, where houses were bulldozed to make way for Barclays Center, which he helped build with a real estate developer who is married to the CEO of the library that was honoring him. (Not to mention that Adams is the very same guy who would be cutting library budgets just a few months after that award ceremony.) 

Jay-Z didn’t even support Adams in the 2021 mayoral primary, preferring his rival, Ray McGuire, a CitiBank executive who thought the median cost of a home in Brooklyn was $80,000 to $90,000 (it’s actually $900,000).

In December of 2022, Roc Nation announced that they were partnering with the real estate giant SL Green to try and build a Caesars Palace casino in Times Square. Downstate casinos are projected to bring in billions of dollars a year. That’s a lot of money, and if there’s one thing we know, it’s that Jay-Z loves money—it’s not even his first time trying to bring gaming to New York City. 

While the mayor doesn’t control the state’s casino bidding process, realistically, one isn’t going to get built without his support. So, what did Jay-Z and Eric Adams talk about at the BPL gala? The fate of Flaco? How the mayor’s son, Jordan Coleman, fared as a Roc Nation creative coordinator?

Roc Nation didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Will New Yorkers ultimately benefit from these two powerful Brooklynites congratulating each other on the steps of the main branch of their public library? Probably not, but it’s important for Jay-Z and Adams that New Yorkers think they will.