It remains shocking that Reasonable Doubt was Jay-Z’s debut album. Every creative decision feels so measured and manicured. Similar to Nas’ Illmatic, it’s such an evocative portrait of street life in New York, where every record places you in the heat of every moment.

Both albums play like the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of storytelling in one album, with so many crystal clear details that make the album what it is. But for Jay-Z, the reason the album works at all was because of how ‘naïve’ he was.

In the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters series by The New York Times, they asked Hov to chronicle his journey and detail his process. By the time he got to his debut album, he explained that most of it was already swirling in his head.

Jay-Z Explains The Thought Process Behind His Classic Album ‘Reasonable Doubt’

All he needed was to tell his story and get it all out of his system. However, where a lot of his albums can feel a bit methodical in their rapping, Reasonable Doubt wasn’t.

“The thing about that album is the freedom in it and how naïve I was. I didn’t know anything about the music business,” Jay-Z said. “I wasn’t trying to make the greatest song. ‘Streets is Watching‘, the verse is like 68 bars. I was not like 16 structured bars that I know would be palatable for the audience.”

Instead, Jay wanted to make an album that reflected his upbringing and how it would make the friends he grew up with react. Knowing that they would be acutely aware of the details he was portraying made it all worth it.

“What I was thinking during Reasonable Doubt was, when my guys hear this… their minds are gonna be blown,” Jay-Z recalled. “We just left Vegas. And this tells the story of our whole trip. They’re gonna go crazy. This story that we just completed, now we’re back home, they’re hearing on wax.”

Beyond that, he was also aware that it would resonate with anyone who lived the kind of life he did at one point. “I was trying to make music for guys who were in the street and living just like us. To have a soundtrack to the emotions that we were dealing with,” Jay-Z continued.

“Not just the highs, not the Lexus. That was part of it. That’s the eye candy, the Lexus with the TV sets. But the interior feelings was really what I was trying to accomplish as a writer. Like how do I go even deeper?… I know exactly what you felt in that moment, when you felt that paranoia or that exhilaration, whatever it was.”