50 on The Breakfast Club.
Part 2.
Damn yo.. 50 proving again he is one of the smartest in the game. This dude does some serious exposing and knowledge dropping, a must watch as it's one of the best Breakfast Club interviews IMO.
- Diddy being scummy and using Biggie's image to promote himself and his music in the new era
- Being on the same flight as Ja Rule
- Shot 13 music videos for Animal Ambition and why
- Breakdown of his relationships with Yayo/Banks ("if you don't sustain your value in the marketplace, I put you at the market rate")
- How Lloyd Banks fucked up his own career and keeps fucking it up
- Changes in Interscope and G-Unit business that led to the current state
- Kendrick & Q's success, why they worked and why G-Unit or "these new guys" flop
- How Sha Money nearly left $1.3 million on the table, or pretty much how uneducated people are in the game
- On why Jay grooms artists right and why G-Unit artists don't know how to grind: "Whey Jay-Z signs someone, you never see them with him, until they get hot enough to function without Jay-Z"
- Why hip-hop consumers in 2014 are like fiends when he used to sell dope, how he adjusted his release strategy to fit that "they will cop from anyone who has something good, and it doesn't have to be regular"
- Jay taking the Ye/50 competition personally, a larger industry competition between Interscope and Def Jam
- Takes some slick shots (but not really?) at Bey doing more for Jay than vice versa
- Explains why Jay, Fabolous and Jadakiss are important to the culture and essentially the same person
- Goes into detail about his relationship with Jimmy Iovine
- On starting his own headphone thing in the face of Iovine's Beats: "Russel Simmons didn't tell us not to sell urban clothing"
- Iovine's strategy with Beats, related: Pop That being Puff's first #1 single in 10 years and why French flopped hard (partially because of Puff)
- "Chief Keef is what my son would have been, if he didn't make it"
- Charlamagne: "Do you think street credibility still matters in hip-hop?" 50: "I don't even think it exists"
- Buying demographic doesn't know the importance of being street, "there is no urban culture, it is all high fashion"
- "Young Thug is actually the one who called it a dress; the others call it a kilt"
- Defends himself against allegations that he killed NY hip-hop
- NY no longer having a "big homie," talks about how Diddy did Angels but was living in Miami: "I was like nah man, you gotta stand next to something. Because you've been standing next to something your entire career"
- "Puffy might as well be the destination for somebody going nowhere"
- Talks about everything being about momentum "Me and Jay don't make decisions that don't make sense. That's why you see Forbes 1-2-3 Remix"
- Thinks Jay took a shot at Drake just to stifle his momentum
- Hip-hop isn't homophobic, it just has no place for people that are sensitive (I kind of get what he's saying though inevitably it will be taken out of context)
- "Everything Dre produces, is for Detox"
- Says Dre figured at some point that if it wasn't going to mean everything to hip-hop that it was, it would hurt the brand more than it would help (Beats, not music).. "That's when I started thinking Interscope started turning into Beats Records"
- Charlamagne: "What do you say to people who say you fell off?" 50: "My accountant has no idea what you're talking about. I took the Jay as Def Jam President move."
- On blogs: "I'm not trying to gain an audience, I'm trying to sustain one, until they start to persuade each other"
50 still the realest in the game, and he can articulate himself better than even Jay. You can construe a lot of this as shots at Jay and Puff, but he's talking that real. If that's too big of a block of text, you gotta listen to the interview, dude has quotable lines like every minute. Kept it 4hunna.
hew:
