I got love for Damon Dash as I did before. I don’t know if we can be around each other in that way because times have changed. He may be a totally different person.
JAY-ZNo one came to our neighborhoods with stand-up jobs and showed us there’s a different way. Maybe, had I seen different role models, maybe I’d’ve turned on to that.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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I’m just going to make the music I love to make, and I’m going to mature with my music.
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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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When I came into the music, I was forced to be a CEO. I was forced to be an entrepreneur; I was forced to… because I was looking for a deal. I didn’t have this grand scheme of starting a record company and then morphing into a clothing empire.
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I don’t profess to be a political rapper, like groups such as ‘Dead Prez’ or ‘Public Enemy’, but I think social commentary should make its way into your music. Speaking on your neighbourhood is social commentary – what happens, what’s going on.
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Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don’t think it’s given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely.
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I try to make music with emotion and integrity. And authenticity.
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People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name.
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The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need: it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden.
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I think the problem with people, as they start to mature, they say, ‘Rap is a young man’s game,’ and they keep trying to make young songs. But you don’t know the slang – it changes every day, and you’re just visiting. So you’re trying to be something you’re not, and the audience doesn’t buy into that.
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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.
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Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank they don’t like to think of themselves as poor.
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I 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.
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I listen to everything – from Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette all the way down to rap like Scarface, UGK and Lauryn Hill.
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Just strengthening that theme that America is a place of opportunity and hoping to inspire people to fulfill those opportunities, and to want more, and to want better, and to see the places we can go. So many people identify with me because of the place that I come from.
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All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I’m feeling at the time, whatever direction I’m heading in.
JAY-Z