It is possible that the music of the rapper Jay-Z may not be in the “most played” section of many Times readers' iPods - or the iPods of Glastonbury fans, to judge from reports that blame the rapper for slow ticket sales this year (although “slow” for Glastonbury simply means that it didn't sell out in ten minutes).

Jay-Z is unlikely to lose sleep over this. Last week he married his girlfriend, the nubile Beyoncé, with whom he collaborated on her monster hit Crazy In Love. And he is huge in America: he has sold more than 33 million albums since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt; his 1998 album Hard Knock Life went five times platinum; in 2006 he was reported to be earning nearly £5,000 an hour, and his personal fortune is estimated at more than $500 million (£250 million). The politics of a muddy field in Somerset are probably not uppermost in his mind.

His is a classic rags-to-riches American dream. He was born Shawn Carter in 1969, in a rough part of Brooklyn. Dad left before he hit his teens and the young Jazzy, as he was then known, started to make a name for himself as a rapper, with a little light drug-dealing on the side to make ends meet.

“First time I saw someone get killed, I was 9 years old,” he once said. “It happens so much it becomes normal to you.” But Jay-Z was destined for more than petty drugdealing. Clever, talented and with a wicked sense of humour, he and Damon Dash founded their own record company to release his first album (cutting out the middle man) and cheekily called it Roc-A-Fella Records.

“When you grow up in these neighbourhoods and you don't have any hope,” he once said, “you feel you'll take a chance with your life to make the situation better.”

And make the situation better he did. He has won numerous awards, including Rap Artist of the Year in 1999 and two Grammys, one for Best Rap Performance for a song with the genius title Big Pimpin'. He was, as his own website sweetly points out, the first hip-hop artist to have a private audience with the Prince of Wales. He has worked with Notorious BIG, Missy Elliott and Kanye West, co-owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team, has a string of sports bars, sold the Rocawear fashion label for £108.5 million in 2007, and is now in a position to say: “The great thing for me is that I don't have to do anything for the money. I only do it because I like it.”

He is, he says, the best rapper of all time, albeit partly thanks to the untimely demise of Tupac Shakur and Notorious BIG “before they had a chance to really fulfil their destiny”.

“My music is not really about rapping. It is more about the things I've seen, things I've done,” he said recently. “It's more about life.” What the bling rapper from Brooklyn will make of wellies remains to be seen.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010