Author Topic: JAY Z NEW INTERVIEW  (Read 128 times)

Myrealname

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JAY Z NEW INTERVIEW
« on: November 13, 2002, 05:09:16 AM »
If you didn't have a global phone, you weren't getting in contact with Jay-Z. And if you were lucky enough to catch up with Young Hova, you weren't going to talk his head off. The Jiggaman had left behind the Bentley coupes to fly away for his first vacation "ever."

He took half the summer off to travel through Europe, along the way mingling with music A-listers (he had drinks with Quincy Jones, recorded with Mariah Carey and went to Bono's house for lunch). He rubbed shoulders with sports royalty (he just had to go to Wimbledon to see his buddies the Williams sisters play in the finals) and politicked with official bluebloods in St. Tropez, the kind of people who have no problem going to the club and buying a $20,000 bottle of Magnum Cristal that's as tall as a five-year-old child. Jay-Z just chilled.  

If anybody needed some time off, it was Jay. His November 12 release, the double LP The Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse, is his seventh album since 1999 — a two-every 365-days pace that even the late Tupac would have been proud of — and Jay recorded 40 tracks for the set in about a month's time. In addition to that, Jay's been riding on a professional and personal roller coaster, and these ups and downs had exhausted him.

"I just believe everything happens for a reason," Hovi explained while sitting in front of a fireplace in New York's Giraffe hotel, a few weeks after his jaunt around the world. He was pondering his highs and lows. "I don't sit and say, 'Why did this happen?' My energy and focus is to make sure it don't happen again. My saying is, 'It is what it is.' If people just left me alone I would probably be in trouble. The more controversy, the more things I got to say, and the better I will be."

In June 2001 it seemed that things couldn't get any better. Jay was at his most triumphant point, pulling off one of the most memorable hip-hop performances of all time at New York radio station Hot 97's Summer Jam concert. ("I told Mike, people never seen you," he remembered about asking special guest Michael Jackson to come out onstage with him. "People never saw you at the laundromat, people never saw you at the store, people never saw you, and they love you.") But then later that summer, his close friend Aaliyah died in a plane crash. Following that nadir, he completed one of the best-received LPs of his career, The Blueprint, and fought off bootlegging only to drop the album on September 11 amidst a terrorist strike on the U.S. But not even the Taliban deterred Jay's fans from going to the stores and copping his album: He debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums chart the following week. Later, however, in the midst of a successful tour, Jay's battle with Nas came to a boiling point, with Jigga ultimately coming out on the losing end (so said the streets).

And the constant ebb and flow of Jigga's fortune doesn't stop there. In October of 2001, the courts said that Jay had to serve three years of probation after he pleaded guilty to stabbing Lance "Un" Rivera. However, Jigga did dodge a gun possession charge earlier that month. Far from being shell-shocked, Jay completed yet another LP by the beginning of 2002, this time the much-hyped collaboration with R. Kelly, The Best of Both Worlds, only to have the plans for the album fizzle in the wake of Kelly's sex scandal.

 "I was not concerned for my career as an artist," Jay clarified about how the promotions for the album abruptly ceased. "I wasn't there, I know that I had nothing to do with [Kelly's] alleged incident. When I think about the album, [I see it as] a blown opportunity. We were in the process of touring, we were putting together like a two-hour show. It would have been something so creative.
 
"The whole reason the album came together was we said, 'Let's do something creative that nobody's really done before,' 'Let's bring these two genres of music together and make something really crazy and let's go on tour and make history.' We'd probably be in Europe right now. It would have probably had four tour legs together, it would have been a beast."

While Jay hasn't been in constant contact with his friend, he still wishes him the best.

"He is getting calls from everywhere and everybody," Jay, who said he spoke to Kelly a couple of times since the scandal broke, explained. "Some people are concerned and some people just want to be nosy, they want to know what's going on in the guy's life and I don't want to be a person like that. I got love for the dude. If he's guilty, I hope and I pray that he gets help. If he is not, I hope that everybody embraces him."

Starting November 12, Jay is hoping that all the fans who embraced its predecessor will do the same with Blueprint 2, and set him back on the upswing.

"I recorded all the songs for a double album in a little over a month," Jay explained. He worked with a diverse array of characters ranging from Outkast's Big Boi to Snoop Dogg's protégé Latoiya Williams.

"Our studio session was more or less like a big joke," Scarface, who performs on "Somehow, Someway" with Jay and Beanie Sigel, said of working with the Roc. "You go in there and see Jay shooting pool. You see Beans on the sofa asleep. Jay always plays sh-- for me, torturing me, playing the new Blueprint. I think he does that to fire me up. Then he'll play the song he wants me to get on. I'm like, 'How can you do this to me, man? You play all this heat and you want me to compete with the heat?' "

"That is exactly what I did," Jay explained about sequestering himself in the studio. "I did not want to be influenced by the outside. The Blueprint 2, I wanted it to be about my thoughts and where I am in my life, what's going on, what I see in the future. With this album I wanted to go different places and use different types of songs and music. You go from Lenny Kravitz to Dr. Dre to Young Chris."

Sitting in Baseline studios early this fall, it looked like Jiggaman was losing it after he made a call to "stop the music!" In actuality, he and producer Kanye West found it. Inspiration, that is.

It had been weeks since Jay-Z put the call into Kanye, asking one of the new Roc-A-Fella recording artists and producer of such Jigga hits as "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)," "The Takeover" and "Never Change" for a smash. Obviously the duo make beautiful music together, but this time had to be a little different, it had to be "next level" special. Jay wanted Kanye to produce the first single from his Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse LP, which just so happened to have a slot for guest star and Jigga gal pal Beyoncé Knowles, or "B" as he refers to her. It had to be an event.


 


 

Myrealname

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Re:JAY Z NEW INTERVIEW
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2002, 05:10:26 AM »
"That's going to be a problem," Jay said with a smile moments later, making it clear he liked what he heard. "Turn that back on!"

"I knew that record was going to cause a stir," Jay recalled weeks after the session.

Jay didn't put a call into Phillip Michael Thomas' Psychic Friends Network, but was nonetheless dead-on with his prophecy. He probably didn't think his song would cause the kind of stir it did, however.

"Ya heard!" an irate Toni Braxton said to New York radio personality Wendy Williams last month, while phoning into Williams' show. Braxton, who also took from Tupac's song for a track on her album called "Me and My Boyfriend," accused Jay of biting her idea. Jay has denied those allegations.

Ironically, the biggest problem that could have come when trying to put out his " '03 Bonnie & Clyde" turned out not to be a dilemma at all. Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur, and Suge Knight were willing to clear the sample for Jay.

"It was nothing personal, we never met," Jay said of the disses Pac threw at him on record before his passing. "You know, he and Big went through their thing. I was Big's man, that was the extent of our big beef. Whatever [animosity] we had died with him.

"Suge was real cool," Jay continued about getting the sample cleared. "He was like, 'We are above that bull or whatever, I'm cool with it.' Tupac's mom and Ms. Wallace gave me an award one time on MTV, [and Afeni Shakur] said to me, 'When I hugged you onstage, whatever my son had [with you] was over.' I was like, 'It was over for me before that.' Every show I did there was a moment I took to say, 'Put your two up for Tupac, put your lighter up for Big.' She asked me to be on [Tupac's] next album and this is probably an album that has more stuff on there about me and I was like, 'Cool.' Like I said, he's not here to repair our relationship."

One relationship that is in no need of repair is Jay's relationship with Beyoncé. It seems all good, and he's trying to keep it that way, thus his evasiveness when talking about the extent of their bond.

"If you are from the 'hood and you got 1,000 people living in the projects, you got 1,000 people in your business," he said of being tight-lipped. "It's going to put a strain on your relationship that you would never, ever believe. So I wouldn't put 80 million people in [our relationship]. So I'm not saying yes, I'm not saying no. Listen to the record, maybe it's entertainment, maybe it's not."

Sometimes it seems that being an entertainer brings Jay as many problems as it does perks. However, in the end, he looks at everything as a blessing.

"I have a gift and with that gift certain things come with it," Hovi said. "You have to put up with people who think of you this way and people who think of you that way. And put up with not ever having a moment to chill or relax if you're outside.

"There is never a downtime in your life," he continued. "Your whole life you are in a glass, you're a in a fish tank, you can't go outside. You can't have bad days. If I don't want to sign 50 autographs, I will do 25, and [some people might say], 'Well, I bought your album.' You can't explain it to them that 'I m just feeling a little sick today.' The more you explain, the worse it gets. Like 'My arm is broken,' 'Oh, you can't sign with your other hand?' It's cool though, because at the end of the day it's out of love."
 

Young Dan Iza

Re:JAY Z NEW INTERVIEW
« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2002, 10:28:22 AM »
yeah good job jackin this from mtvnews.com asshole
 

Myrealname

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Re:JAY Z NEW INTERVIEW
« Reply #3 on: November 13, 2002, 11:34:53 AM »
yeah good job jackin this from mtvnews.com asshole
Bitch whats your problem ?
Read it if u like it or shut up  :D  :D
« Last Edit: November 13, 2002, 12:03:13 PM by Myrealname »