MintyFreshBeats
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from XXL
Do It Again
You wanna know why it’s just been announced that Ghostface has a new album supposedly coming out this Dec? Maybe ’cause President Carter hasn’t gotten over the failure of Fishscale. Taking a break from talk of his new LP, Jay spoke on his continued support of Ghostface despite the brick he caught last spring.
Jay-Z:
“All you can do is make a great album. You know, that’s all you can do. People can throw a million dollars in marketing at it, but if it doesn’t catch, or, in these days, if you don’t have a record that’s not spinning every second on the radio and you don’t have the most mass attention on the project from an audience standpoint, then, I mean, there’s nothing you can do about it. He made a great album. You gotta make a great album. I think he should be proud of the fact that he made a great album. I spoke to Ghostface so he’s cool. But, you know, hopefully, next time.”
Best of Both Worlds: How Hova and Dre built Kingdom Come’s blueprint.
Jay-Z:
“Dre just called me out of nowhere, and he just said, ‘Yo I’m in Hawaii, I’m about to send you something.’ Now Dre, you know, he’s not a tape making person. He sent me about like 25 beats, and it was gone from there. It was like, Okay, this is a problem right now. You know, 25 Dre beats, I mean, what the ****.”
“Actually we was going to do the whole album together but I knew that wouldn’t work, only because it’s Dr. Dre and Jay-Z, you know, its very difficult to get those two guys in a room together. Dre, he’s a creative guy so you can’t push those kind of guys. He works his own
way. You gotta let him work at his own pace. So, I knew that wouldn’t happen. But we started out like we was going to do the whole album and then, you know, he disappeared for a minute. I left him alone, I didn’t call him for a couple months. Maybe two months. Two months.”
“Then I just called him, like, ‘Yo, uh, I want you to mix something.’ I just picked up the conversation like no time had went by. It went smooth, you know what I’m saying? With the records, I would ask him, ‘Like, what did you think about that? You love that second verse? What about that third ’cause I can change it.’”
“You know, Dre or whoever is producing the track, I’ll let the producer be a producer. Sometimes producers don’t want to be producers, they wanna make beats. But working with Dre, it made me critique what I was saying a little more also. Cause I want to be better than the beats too. No one wants the beat to be destroying them. You try to beat the track, no matter who did it.”
Young Guru:
“Yeah, Dre was in Hawaii and started sending him CD’s and he started playing me some **** and I was like, ‘Yeah, we gotta get started.’ He had a good 21 beats he sent him on one CD. All that does is get Jay in the stu’ getting in the mindset of making a record. Now you call Swizz and be like, ‘Swizz, come upstairs and play Jay some ****. Sean Garrett, Swizz is up here, ya’ll is writing a record together, come up here and see if you can do a hook for Jay.’ Just flipping ideas to try and get him in the mode or make suggestions of what you think he should write about. It’s not the easiest thing, cuz it’s like, looking back what topic haven’t we covered?”
“The thing about Jay is that, the reason he has the longevity is because everything he talks about is true. He pulls from his own life. All the rumors and questions, whatever you want to know, all those things are answered on the album. If you listen hard enough, it’s there. All the **** that you want to hear about the Roc breakup, the baby with Free, any rumor, it’s in the album. Then he goes a bit more personal, normally Jay does what he does; the hardcore ****, the ‘Change Clothes’ joints that he knows will get the majority of the people and he may give you one or two personal songs. This album, to me, it seems like it has crazy personal songs. A lot of this stuff is like really really personal ****.”
Start of Your Ending: How Jay-Z finally got it together to start recording music again.
Jay-Z: “I put myself in the studio to really get into it. Just me and Guru. Just to feel it out. And it took me like, two weeks [to get going]. I wasn’t even making anything. I would go there and just stand there for a couple hours and just listen to new tracks. Then I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll come back tomorrow.’”
“I would do a full day. I did it in Sony a lot. I would go to the studio and I wouldn’t stay late either. I would stay til about 12, 1. You know, about seven, eight, til 12, one, everyday. I wouldn’t go in Sunday though. I needed a day off.”
Youg Guru:
“It’s been the weirdest process of making a Jay album because he’s running a company. My normal experience with Jay used to be around two o’clock, he’d be sitting in the front of Baseline, Just Blaze would be doing whatever he’s doing and I’d be collecting beats for the day. Jay would come in and we’d make records in about three or four weeks and the album is done. He’d hold court here or be at the 40/40. Now it’s like, he’s running a whole company and I really don’t like playing him beats in the office. The phone rings, everybody’s around or someone needs him to sign something or run to a meeting. I gotta get him when his attention is necessary.”
“That’s the main reason why we didn’t do it at Baseline. That’s home. We did it at Sony because it’s four blocks away from the office. Like, around May he got serious. In the beginning, I tried to keep it secretive to everybody in the building. Baseline is kind of secluded so there’s not gonna be another session going on in there with somebody that you don’t know. Sony is a big studio. You see the Maybach out front, then you start seeing three or four known rappers out front. It got to the point at the end where everybody knew we had been there for a month already. With people starting to drop by, you can’t really concentrate. That’s the only reason why I was trying to keep it secret. Not for the public not to know we’re making an album, I wanted him to be able to focus and come through that door so we can just work and make a record. It’s hard sometime because it’s certain people that’s family. You can’t say, “Don’t come over here.” But at some point, I need this nigga focused on making this. With Jay, it’s a spark, and this time it was with Dre.”
Okay, I know. Two songs have leaked in less than a week. And rumors persist that there are more good tunes in the wrong hands. Damn, guess that’s what Hov gets for goin’ the **** back to Africa. Still, I’m sorry to report, greedy rap gremlins, that when I spoke to Jay in Paris and the Kingdom Come brain trust (producer Just Blaze and engineer Young Guru) back in New York, they all insisted that the album is far from finished. You don’t believe me? Read for yourselves.
Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter:
“I saw a couple of them [fake Kingdom Come track lists on the Internet]. Nah, it’s crazy. I think I’m two songs away. Right now, if I drop the album, it’s really good. If I get two more songs, it could be great. I need [two more songs] because of the album. Everything on there so far is really big. It’s big-sounding. I wouldn’t say real musical, ’cause I wouldn’t want to give people the wrong idea. Late Registration, to me, sounds like a big album. But you still had “Crack Music” and you know, you still had the raw…I just need two stripped-down joints just to round it out, to give the whole thing a theme and a feeling.”
Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton:
“I was reading a lot of bull**** online—fake track lists, features and producers we don’t even know…I don’t know what’s gonna make it until I actually master it. There’s no rapper features on here. The only other feature on here, in terms of vocalists, is Beyoncé.”
“It’s always a core, but **** changes. The perfect example is ‘P.S.A.’ ‘P.S.A.’ didn’t exist until right when we were about to master. The tough part now is that he’s doing the world tour, so we gotta email him beats. He’s recording over there, sending stuff back and forth. Where they’re at now in Africa, nobody’s email is working. Me and Bleek was online yesterday on the IM and he was cutting off on me every five minutes. It was a real weak connection, so those type of physical things are the challenges right now of him actually getting his album done. It’s a lot. Dude is a huge world tastemaker, so it’s like, having to pull his focus in to get what I need for the album is tough, but it’s not impossible. It’s one of his joys, so he does it.”
Justin “Just Blaze” Smith:
“If he’s coming out November 20, he’ll probably be in the studio until at least late October. There are two other songs I did with him, neither one [is] finished yet. We had this one record where the beat changes throughout the entire record. He hasn’t put vocals on it yet. He loves the beat, but just hasn’t thought of a song for it. I’m praying that one gets to see the light of day ’cause the beat is so ill. Just something for the car or headphones. It would make for an ill story, but not a club record by any means.”
“One song he had I did over. I had a better beat for it. It fit crazy. The funny thing is, none of this is intentional. It ends up using another sample that was used in another song. The other beat, it’s used in the intro of another popular late-’80’s, early-’90s song. So it’s kind of funny, I was thinking about this right before you came in. That’s three records that, in some shape or form, have some kind of connection to ten, twenty years ago. That’s gonna be the new thing: Just is running out of ideas. But it’s pure coincidence.”
“I can say I’ll definitely have four records on the album. We’ll see what happens.”
Do It Again
You wanna know why it’s just been announced that Ghostface has a new album supposedly coming out this Dec? Maybe ’cause President Carter hasn’t gotten over the failure of Fishscale. Taking a break from talk of his new LP, Jay spoke on his continued support of Ghostface despite the brick he caught last spring.
Jay-Z:
“All you can do is make a great album. You know, that’s all you can do. People can throw a million dollars in marketing at it, but if it doesn’t catch, or, in these days, if you don’t have a record that’s not spinning every second on the radio and you don’t have the most mass attention on the project from an audience standpoint, then, I mean, there’s nothing you can do about it. He made a great album. You gotta make a great album. I think he should be proud of the fact that he made a great album. I spoke to Ghostface so he’s cool. But, you know, hopefully, next time.”
Best of Both Worlds: How Hova and Dre built Kingdom Come’s blueprint.
Jay-Z:
“Dre just called me out of nowhere, and he just said, ‘Yo I’m in Hawaii, I’m about to send you something.’ Now Dre, you know, he’s not a tape making person. He sent me about like 25 beats, and it was gone from there. It was like, Okay, this is a problem right now. You know, 25 Dre beats, I mean, what the ****.”
“Actually we was going to do the whole album together but I knew that wouldn’t work, only because it’s Dr. Dre and Jay-Z, you know, its very difficult to get those two guys in a room together. Dre, he’s a creative guy so you can’t push those kind of guys. He works his own
way. You gotta let him work at his own pace. So, I knew that wouldn’t happen. But we started out like we was going to do the whole album and then, you know, he disappeared for a minute. I left him alone, I didn’t call him for a couple months. Maybe two months. Two months.”
“Then I just called him, like, ‘Yo, uh, I want you to mix something.’ I just picked up the conversation like no time had went by. It went smooth, you know what I’m saying? With the records, I would ask him, ‘Like, what did you think about that? You love that second verse? What about that third ’cause I can change it.’”
“You know, Dre or whoever is producing the track, I’ll let the producer be a producer. Sometimes producers don’t want to be producers, they wanna make beats. But working with Dre, it made me critique what I was saying a little more also. Cause I want to be better than the beats too. No one wants the beat to be destroying them. You try to beat the track, no matter who did it.”
Young Guru:
“Yeah, Dre was in Hawaii and started sending him CD’s and he started playing me some **** and I was like, ‘Yeah, we gotta get started.’ He had a good 21 beats he sent him on one CD. All that does is get Jay in the stu’ getting in the mindset of making a record. Now you call Swizz and be like, ‘Swizz, come upstairs and play Jay some ****. Sean Garrett, Swizz is up here, ya’ll is writing a record together, come up here and see if you can do a hook for Jay.’ Just flipping ideas to try and get him in the mode or make suggestions of what you think he should write about. It’s not the easiest thing, cuz it’s like, looking back what topic haven’t we covered?”
“The thing about Jay is that, the reason he has the longevity is because everything he talks about is true. He pulls from his own life. All the rumors and questions, whatever you want to know, all those things are answered on the album. If you listen hard enough, it’s there. All the **** that you want to hear about the Roc breakup, the baby with Free, any rumor, it’s in the album. Then he goes a bit more personal, normally Jay does what he does; the hardcore ****, the ‘Change Clothes’ joints that he knows will get the majority of the people and he may give you one or two personal songs. This album, to me, it seems like it has crazy personal songs. A lot of this stuff is like really really personal ****.”
Start of Your Ending: How Jay-Z finally got it together to start recording music again.
Jay-Z: “I put myself in the studio to really get into it. Just me and Guru. Just to feel it out. And it took me like, two weeks [to get going]. I wasn’t even making anything. I would go there and just stand there for a couple hours and just listen to new tracks. Then I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll come back tomorrow.’”
“I would do a full day. I did it in Sony a lot. I would go to the studio and I wouldn’t stay late either. I would stay til about 12, 1. You know, about seven, eight, til 12, one, everyday. I wouldn’t go in Sunday though. I needed a day off.”
Youg Guru:
“It’s been the weirdest process of making a Jay album because he’s running a company. My normal experience with Jay used to be around two o’clock, he’d be sitting in the front of Baseline, Just Blaze would be doing whatever he’s doing and I’d be collecting beats for the day. Jay would come in and we’d make records in about three or four weeks and the album is done. He’d hold court here or be at the 40/40. Now it’s like, he’s running a whole company and I really don’t like playing him beats in the office. The phone rings, everybody’s around or someone needs him to sign something or run to a meeting. I gotta get him when his attention is necessary.”
“That’s the main reason why we didn’t do it at Baseline. That’s home. We did it at Sony because it’s four blocks away from the office. Like, around May he got serious. In the beginning, I tried to keep it secretive to everybody in the building. Baseline is kind of secluded so there’s not gonna be another session going on in there with somebody that you don’t know. Sony is a big studio. You see the Maybach out front, then you start seeing three or four known rappers out front. It got to the point at the end where everybody knew we had been there for a month already. With people starting to drop by, you can’t really concentrate. That’s the only reason why I was trying to keep it secret. Not for the public not to know we’re making an album, I wanted him to be able to focus and come through that door so we can just work and make a record. It’s hard sometime because it’s certain people that’s family. You can’t say, “Don’t come over here.” But at some point, I need this nigga focused on making this. With Jay, it’s a spark, and this time it was with Dre.”
Okay, I know. Two songs have leaked in less than a week. And rumors persist that there are more good tunes in the wrong hands. Damn, guess that’s what Hov gets for goin’ the **** back to Africa. Still, I’m sorry to report, greedy rap gremlins, that when I spoke to Jay in Paris and the Kingdom Come brain trust (producer Just Blaze and engineer Young Guru) back in New York, they all insisted that the album is far from finished. You don’t believe me? Read for yourselves.
Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter:
“I saw a couple of them [fake Kingdom Come track lists on the Internet]. Nah, it’s crazy. I think I’m two songs away. Right now, if I drop the album, it’s really good. If I get two more songs, it could be great. I need [two more songs] because of the album. Everything on there so far is really big. It’s big-sounding. I wouldn’t say real musical, ’cause I wouldn’t want to give people the wrong idea. Late Registration, to me, sounds like a big album. But you still had “Crack Music” and you know, you still had the raw…I just need two stripped-down joints just to round it out, to give the whole thing a theme and a feeling.”
Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton:
“I was reading a lot of bull**** online—fake track lists, features and producers we don’t even know…I don’t know what’s gonna make it until I actually master it. There’s no rapper features on here. The only other feature on here, in terms of vocalists, is Beyoncé.”
“It’s always a core, but **** changes. The perfect example is ‘P.S.A.’ ‘P.S.A.’ didn’t exist until right when we were about to master. The tough part now is that he’s doing the world tour, so we gotta email him beats. He’s recording over there, sending stuff back and forth. Where they’re at now in Africa, nobody’s email is working. Me and Bleek was online yesterday on the IM and he was cutting off on me every five minutes. It was a real weak connection, so those type of physical things are the challenges right now of him actually getting his album done. It’s a lot. Dude is a huge world tastemaker, so it’s like, having to pull his focus in to get what I need for the album is tough, but it’s not impossible. It’s one of his joys, so he does it.”
Justin “Just Blaze” Smith:
“If he’s coming out November 20, he’ll probably be in the studio until at least late October. There are two other songs I did with him, neither one [is] finished yet. We had this one record where the beat changes throughout the entire record. He hasn’t put vocals on it yet. He loves the beat, but just hasn’t thought of a song for it. I’m praying that one gets to see the light of day ’cause the beat is so ill. Just something for the car or headphones. It would make for an ill story, but not a club record by any means.”
“One song he had I did over. I had a better beat for it. It fit crazy. The funny thing is, none of this is intentional. It ends up using another sample that was used in another song. The other beat, it’s used in the intro of another popular late-’80’s, early-’90s song. So it’s kind of funny, I was thinking about this right before you came in. That’s three records that, in some shape or form, have some kind of connection to ten, twenty years ago. That’s gonna be the new thing: Just is running out of ideas. But it’s pure coincidence.”
“I can say I’ll definitely have four records on the album. We’ll see what happens.”
