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.
JAY-ZI’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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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.
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My dad was such a good dad that when he left, he left a huge scar. He was my superhero.
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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.
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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 sit around with my friends and talk about money, ever. On a record, that’s different.
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I’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!’
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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.
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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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The challenge is to get everyone to respect music again, to recognize its value.
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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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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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I think reviews have lost a lot of their importance now because of the Internet; everyone is experiencing things at the same time.
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Music is the soundtrack to your life. It’s not going to go anywhere. But the way people are purchasing music has changed. It’s not the same anymore. It will never be the same.
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When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this ’cause we both were outcasts.
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As kids, we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could.
JAY-Z