I don’t sit around with my friends and talk about money, ever. On a record, that’s different.
JAY-ZMy passion is music, you know, and music influences culture, influences lifestyle, which leads me to ‘Roc-A-Wear’. I was forced to be an entrepreneur, so that led me to be CEO of ‘Roc-A-Fella’ records, which lead to Def Jam.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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If you look at my career and you look at the span of my work and the things I have done, as far as to garner fame, you’ll see that I have turned down more interviews than I do. Or I turn down more things than I do.
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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 was talking about in slang, and it was something that people in the music business was not really privy to. They didn’t understand totally what I was saying or what I was talking about.
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I’ll make a song with Rick Rubin, a song with Beyonce, a song with Lenny Kravitz. I just believe in making good music. I’m not trying to section myself off into just making hard-core rap music.
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I grew up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and my mom and pop had an extensive record collection, so Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and all of those sounds and souls of Motown filled the house.
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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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I learned to ride a ten-speed when I was 4 or 5. My uncle gave me the bike, hand-me-down, and everyone used to stare at me riding up and down this block. I was too short to reach the pedals, so I put my legs through the V of the frame. I was famous. The little kid who could ride the ten-speed.
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It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
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When the TV version of Annie came on, I was drawn to it. It was the struggle of this poor kid in this environment and how her life changed. It immediately resonated.
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Everyone knows I’m married; I just don’t discuss it. Because it’s a part of my life that I’d rather keep private… When your whole life is played out in front of everybody, for your sanity, you need parts that are just yours.
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As an artist, you make music. And if you see people who don’t know how to market your music, you get involved in it. Otherwise, what you want to accomplish ‘gets lost in translation’ – no pun intended.
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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.
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I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.
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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 love what I do, and when you love what you do, you want to be the best at it.
JAY-Z