People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It’s worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that.
JAY-ZI was an artist, I was executive producer on my first album, so I’ve always had to manage both. I couldn’t get a record deal. It wasn’t by choice – I couldn’t get a record deal, so I had to figure it out.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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I’ve always believed in good music over bad music. I believe in two sorts of musics. And the lines that separate us, I don’t believe in that. That’s for people who need to easily define what they’re hearing. Me, I’m cool with everything and anything I’m hearing that’s music. It comes under one definition for me.
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Belief in oneself and knowing who you are, I mean, that’s the foundation for everything great.
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My brands are an extension of me. They’re close to me. It’s not like running GM, where there’s no emotional attachment.
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We have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.
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What people have to understand is ‘Billboard’ is a magazine. They’re like elected officials – they work for us.
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Hip-hop has done more for race relations than most cultural icons; and I say save Martin Luther King, because his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech was realized when Obama was elected into office.
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I don’t know where streaming will go in the future. The analytics that we’re seeing tell us that streaming is the next thing, and downloads are going down.
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You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.
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I’m just saying the producers and people who work on music are getting left out – that’s when it starts getting criminal. It’s like you’re working hard, and you’re not receiving. In any other business, people would be standing before Congress. They have antitrust laws against this kind of behavior.
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I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’
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Racism 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?
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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.
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I love what I do, and when you love what you do, you want to be the best at it.
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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.
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My mom always taught me – you know, little boys listen to their moms too much – that whatever you put into something is what you’re going to get out of it.
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