The Greatest Songs Ever! Hard Knock Life

COMIC-BOOK characters frequently save the world. But only Little Orphan Annie has saved a hip-hop career.In the months before he released “Hard Knock Life,” following some grueling tour experiences, Jay-Z was planning to quit performing to concentrate on running his record label, Roc-A-Fella. “I wanted to move on to that aspect of the business,” he has said, “instead of running around performing . . . stay somewhere and just put out a lot of new artists.”

But his enthusiasm was rekindled in the month it took him to record Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life at New York’s Hit Factory: “With this album, I was in a real zone creatively. I was so happy making this album – I was like, ’Feed me beats!’ ” The most startling sonic clash to emerge from this period of intense creativity was the title track, an innovative and completely unexpected melding of rap with a 20-year-old Broadway show tune.

Jay-Z first encountered “Hard Knock Life” on tour. “Kid Capri was playing it,” Jay-Z has noted. “He was the DJ in between sets, and we were just coming offstage. When you come offstage, usually you hype over the performance – everybody’s showing you love and you’re in the zone. So that [song] interrupted that whole thing, and I still paid attention to that. It was a real special song.”

“Hard Knock Life,” written by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin in 1977 for the Grammy- and Tony-winning musical Annie, wasn’t exactly an obvious choice for Jay-Z, but composer Strouse says he can see the connection. “In some areas, there’s parallel thinking between me and Jay-Z,” he says. “Most of the songs in Annie are very 1920s, more upbeat, but ’Hard Knock Life’ had to reflect the fact that the kids in the story were underprivileged and exploited. So I wrote a very angry, angular melody, quite unlike the other songs.”

Jay-Z has confirmed Strouse’s thinking, explaining the attraction of Charnin’s lyric: “ ’Instead of treated, we get tricked/Instead of kisses, we get kicked’ – anybody who ever went through any hardship can relate to that song.” To Jay-Z, the exploited child laborers in Annie suffer problems similar to those of ghetto kids, and they respond similarly. “They ain’t singing that song as if they’re sad about it: ’OK, this is our situation. We gonna make the best of it.’ ”

While considering how to transform “Hard Knock Life” into a hip-hop smash, Jay-Z found a second source of inspiration in the Pras track “Ghetto Supastar,” featured on the soundtrack to the Warren Beatty movie Bulworth. “I was like, ’Wow!’ . . . A song like that, it just fits you, and I feel that song fits me so perfectly. I called Pras, and I was like, ’Man! How could you not give me that song?’ ”

Any doubts that a hit could be fashioned from two such diametrically opposed genres were swept aside when the single first earned New York radio airplay and then spread to other cities, peaking at number 15 nationally in March 1999. (In the U.K., it hit number 2.) Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life went platinum in its first week of release and remained at the top of the charts for five weeks, ultimately going quintuple-platinum.

Still, Charles Strouse never heard about the song until it charted. “I heard two black girls singing it in the street,” he says. “As we didn’t have a very big black audience, I wondered why.”

Simple: Jay-Z had cleared the copyright hoops on using the Annie sample at the heart of his song, but Strouse’s publisher hadn’t bothered to notify the composer. “Musically, Jay-Z uses my melody exactly as written, except for the addition of rap beats,” Strouse says. “But as the song was very percussive to start with, that’s not too worrying.”

What was worrying, though, was Jay-Z’s lyrical content. “There’s a lot of ’niggers’ in there, and I don’t think that does black people any good. I’m Jewish, and I’d find it insulting to be referred to as a kike,” Strouse says. Still, he admits, “I’m flattered that my tune has become part of the consciousness of a whole new group.” His wallet has also been greatly enriched by royalties from Jay-Z’s multiplatinum sales.

Singer Danielle Brisebois, however, feels she hasn’t accrued her just rewards. Between ages 7 and 10, she performed in Annie on Broadway, and her voice leads the chorus Jay-Z sampled. In an ironic extension of the plight of Annie’s characters, she now feels she was exploited for having performed for a flat fee rather than a royalty. “I’m singing the lead vocal on a number 1 song,” she gripes, “but not making a penny out of it.”

As for Jay-Z, “Hard Knock Life” earned him something even better than money: acclaim from his childhood hero, Michael Jackson, who asked Jay-Z to work with him. According to Jay-Z, Jackson told him, “ ’You were just so in the pocket on that record, landin’ right on the beat. Incredible.’ ”

A more recent accolade came from another reclusive, eccentric, mysterious source: Dr. Evil, Mike Myers’s spy-spoof villain, who parodied the hit in the summer blockbuster Austin Powers in Goldmember. Along with his more traditional credits – such as winning the Billboard 1998 R&B Album of the Year award and the 1998 Best Rap Album Grammy for Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life – it looks as though the kid from the projects finally got treated instead of tricked.