In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 is released

Why it matters

In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 came out on Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam on November 4, 1997. It is Jay-Z's second album. The interesting thing about it is the production roster: Puff Daddy and the Hitmen produced a substantial chunk of it, which is to say Bad Boy's house team was working on a Roc-A-Fella album less than a year after the Tupac-Biggie killings. The Puff influence is audible. The album has more polished sampled-pop instrumentals and is more chart-radio-shaped than Reasonable Doubt was. "Sunshine" (with Babyface and Foxy Brown). "The City Is Mine" (with Blackstreet, an interpolation of Glenn Frey's "You Belong to the City"). "(Always Be My) Sunshine." Jay later said in interviews he is not satisfied with how this album turned out; he thinks he over-corrected toward the Bad Boy commercial sound in the wake of Biggie's death. But the album is also where the Jay-Z radio formula starts to crystallize: dense Jay verses on top of recognizable pop samples with R&B chorus singers. He would perfect the formula on Vol. 2 the next year and then run it for the next decade. You can hear it being built on this album, even when the album itself does not entirely work.