When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.
JAY-ZI try to make music with emotion and integrity. And authenticity.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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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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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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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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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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We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we’d pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off.
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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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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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When I listen to Amy Winehouse, I believe that her heart and soul is in the music, or if I listen to other British artists like Duffy or Estelle. The aesthetic of it is different, and it’s my point of view. It’s not anything formulaic.
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I don’t have any fear of working with Samsung because I’m not gonna let them put a phone on my forehead; that’s just never gonna happen.
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I’ve talked to Bill Clinton – he’s the ultimate rock star; no one’s more charming than him. People clap in a restaurant when he finishes dinner! I don’t get that treatment. I get it when I walk onstage, but not when I have dinner.
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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 have inherited two of the most important brands in hip-hop, Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella. Reid and Universal Music Group have given me the opportunity to manage the companies I have contributed to my whole career. I feel this is a giant step for me and the entire artist community.
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If just the presence of Tidal causes other companies to have better pay structure or to pay more attention to it moving forward, then we’ve been successful in one way. So we don’t really view them as competitors. As the tide rises, all the boats rise.
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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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Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who’ve never done anything because if you haven’t been successful, then you don’t know how it feels to lose it all.
JAY-Z