This man is just everywhere!
It looks like the Jay Z train is still going strong when it comes to the press, and now he’s taking it to a whole new political level.
The Magna Carta rapper stopped by the Real Time With Bill Maher last night just before the premiere of his video for “Picasso Baby”, where he talked on a panel about social issues, his new album, as well as the criticism from Harry Belafonte.
Sitting alongside Maher, Alexis Goldstein, Josh Barro, and Barney Frank, the five of them dabbled in some pretty heavy topics including racism, crime, policing, and inner city crime.
Hov looked surprisingly comfortable talking about some of these sensitive topics, but we know that he’s certainly got a passion for many of them!
On Belafonte calling him and his wife out, Hov says:
I didn’t think it was the correct venue. If it was something that was a real problem, I’m not difficult to find. Especially someone of his stature. He can reach out to me and we can have a conversation and we can do some good together. That was sort of a bit grand-standing to me. And I didn’t like that. Especially dragging my wife into it. That was a bit of a low blow.”
On who would induct him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (he’s only 7 years away from a nomination):
“Obama.”
If he’s busy:
“He’ll be alright. He owes me a couple.”
On arrogance vs. humility:
“It’s overreaction. If you have the audacity to be great or compare yourself to any of the greats that came before you…If you say just like Obama or Picasso I’m this…people will say it’s almost like blasphemous. But it’s like, what are we doing this for? When you sitting in that chair, you want to be great. You want to be known as the greatest of all time. It’s never going to happen if you don’t see yourself that way first. You have to envision it first.”
On the solution to violence in this country, namely in Chicago:
“I don’t really want to scare America…but the real problem is there’s no middle class. So the gap between the have and have nots is getting wider and wider. It’s going to be a problem that no amount of police can solve, because once you have that oppression and that gap is widening, this is inevitable that something is going to happen.”
While this is just one of another set of big interviews Jay has done in the past month, he also called into Big Boy’s Neighborhood show in LA to talk about some other big subjects.
After being asked about his tour with Justin Timberlake and the Watch The Throne 2 album, Mr. Carter also revealed his opinion on the current state of hip hop, as well as his Nas collaboration.
He even talks about his boy Kanye West‘s line that took a shot at Kris Humphries on “Cold” and making the recent change to his name!
On Legends of the Summer tour:
“Of course, the money is great, but you love it, you love what you do — that comes first. And then second, you just want to keep pushing the culture forward, and pushing the genre forward, and taking hip-hop places that people never thought that it would go. It’s like that Biggie song.”
On the current state of hip-hop:
“A lot of people [keep me on my toes]: Kanye, Drake, J. Cole, and that Kendrick Lamar album was insane. It’s a good time for hip-hop. I mean, think about the year that’s happening, all the albums that’s dropping. It feels like ’96, ’92.”
On Watch the Throne 2:
“Yeah, [Kanye and I] definitely spoke about it. We don’t have any dates lined out for it, but we definitely spoke about dropping solo albums and then going back to do ‘Watch the Throne 2,’ so we’ll see what happens.”
On Kanye’s Kris Humphries line on “Cold”:
“On my birthday, we were on tour, he freestyled in the room, he said the rap in the room, and everybody was like, ‘Oh, that’s a great line!’ People got to understand that it’s entertainment as well. It’s rap music, sometimes it rubs you the wrong way, [but] it’s fun.”
On ditching the hyphen from his name:
“I mean, I started early. Hyphen, that was really big back in the day, now it’s like, it’s not useful anymore. You know, you change with time.”
Check out both interviews above and below!
