Had Reasonable Doubt been released in its original tracklist form, the album would be remembered far differently than it is now. As it stands, Jay has ranked his debut album as his best work.
“My house was the party house; I had the cool parents. My pops and my mom both had afros, it wasn’t just one parent, so I had the super cool house [ laughs]. And they had the record collection, but they didn’t share. They had their names on them separately. They shared a house, they shared kids, but they didn’t share records.
Their name was on their records, that’s how serious it was. It’s almost like a person that plays an instrument. You grow up in a musical family, you pick it up.
And that’s what happened. Music was around me, and this thing, this form called rap, borrowed from these earlier samples. So, that was my instrument.