What people have to understand is ‘Billboard’ is a magazine. They’re like elected officials – they work for us.
JAY-ZExcellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That’s just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it… that’s excellence.
More Jay-Z Quotes
-
-
I think reviews have lost a lot of their importance now because of the Internet; everyone is experiencing things at the same time.
JAY-Z -
I think that’s what happened to the record business when ‘Napster’ came around. The industry rejected what was happening instead of accepting it as change.
JAY-Z -
I think relationships are broken up because of the media.
JAY-Z -
One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal.
JAY-Z -
Primarily I see myself as so much more than a rapper. I really believe I am the voice for a lot of people who don’t have that microphone or who can’t rap.
JAY-Z -
I’m just making an observation. They’re crying out for the love that maybe they didn’t get at home, and they got everything.
JAY-Z -
We have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.
JAY-Z -
I’ve got a nice collection of paintings – a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that’s like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It’s almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There’s a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.
JAY-Z -
People really feel like music is free but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap, and it’s good water. But they’re OK paying for it.
JAY-Z -
When 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-Z -
I’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people.
JAY-Z -
If I go into a studio and find my truth of the moment, there are a number of people in the world who can relate to what I’m saying and are going to buy into what I’m doing. Not because it’s the new thing of the moment, but because it’s genuine emotion. Its how I feel. This is how I articulate the world.
JAY-Z -
Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way.
JAY-Z -
You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that’s from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.
JAY-Z -
By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
JAY-Z