I came into this music business at 26 years old. I was a fully developed man at that point. At that age, I didn’t have anything to prove.
JAY-ZI came into this music business at 26 years old. I was a fully developed man at that point. At that age, I didn’t have anything to prove.
JAY-ZThe challenge is to get everyone to respect music again, to recognize its value.
JAY-ZWhen you’re growing up, your dad is your superhero. Once you’ve let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again.
JAY-ZI treat people based on who they really are, not the name. Everyone has to be respectful and be a human being. No one’s above… That’s how I carry it with anybody.
JAY-ZIf you look at my career and you look at the span of my work and the things I have done, as far as to garner fame, you’ll see that I have turned down more interviews than I do. Or I turn down more things than I do.
JAY-ZI’m just going to make the music I love to make, and I’m going to mature with my music.
JAY-ZI can think of no one more relevant and credible in the hip-hop community to build upon Def Jam’s fantastic legacy and move the company into its next groundbreaking era.
JAY-ZYou make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like ‘I still go to the projects.’ I’m like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it’s so cool?
JAY-ZWe have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.
JAY-ZThey say a midget standing on a giant’s shoulders can see much further than the giant. So I got the whole rap world on my shoulders, they trying to see further than I am.
JAY-ZEveryone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can’t.
JAY-ZNothing me and Kanye can do musically was gonna match the event of what we were trying to do. So we were trying to deliver an album and experience at one time; that was the idea for ‘Watch The Throne’.
JAY-ZI’ve said the election of Obama has made the hustler less relevant. People took it in a way that I was almost dismissing what I am. And I was like, ‘No, it’s a good thing!’
JAY-ZIt was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
JAY-ZDo you know how many athletes go broke three years after they stop playing? I want to help them hold on to their money. I mean, I know about budgets.
JAY-ZRacism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?
JAY-Z