Hip-Hop Rumors: The Jay-Z Picture Everybody Is Talking About!

They say everybody has a twin. Well, Jay-Z has had a few in his day. But it looks like this one is particularly special, because its old NYC.

Original gangster? Some have noted a resemblance to a certain hip-hop mogul (right) in the 1939 photo on the left.

Here is what the NY Times said about this time warp image.

Yes, the New York Public Library swears, the old photo of the guy who looks scarily like Jay-Z really is an unretouched, un-Photoshopped image from 1939. “We’re 100 percent certain it’s legitimate,” Adenike Olanrewaju, a library spokeswoman, said on Friday. Here’s the original:
Sid Grossman, courtesy New York Public Library “Harlem Loiterers,” 1939.
The photo, the library explains on its Tumblr blog, is “Harlem Loiterers” by the street photographer Sid Grossman (no further details are known about it, unfortunately), and it was stumbled across recently by a curator at the library’s Schomburg Center for Research In Black Culture.