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Posts tagged as:
Age 42 – 50 2000-2009
Article Headline: The man: hip-hop music mogul Jermaine Dupri makes hits, jumpstarts careers and has the girl-Janet!
Article Date: Jet, Nov 21, 2005
Hip-hop music mogul Jermaine Dupri just turned 33, but he’s been producing records professionally since the age of 15.
He is the man responsible for making award-winning hit songs for Usher, Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys. He’s helped jumpstart the careers of Bow Wow, Da Brat, Xscape, Jagged Edge, Anthony Hamilton and J-Kwon. And by now everyone knows that he is the man who has Janet Jackson’s heart.
His list of accomplishments continue as CEO of his own label, So So Def Recordings, and his current position as president of urban music at Virgin Records.
“People don’t credit me as much as I need to be credited because I have hit records so much,” said JD, who has had the most No. 1 songs-17-in the last decade. “It’s like they think it’s instant, but it’s not instant.”
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Click Here: Read Part 1
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Click Here: Watch a Video of the Photo Shoot
Q: How does it feel to know you have changed history? Do you think about that a lot?
A: Yeah, I do, I really do. I’m very proud that we opened doors, that it helped tear down a lot. Going around the world, doing tours, in stadiums, you see the influence of the music. When you just look out over the stage, as far as the naked eye could see, you see people. And it’s a wonderful feeling, but it came with a lot of pain, a lot of pain.
Q: How so?
A: When you’re on top of your game, when you’re a pioneer, people come at you. It’s there, who’s at the top, you want to get at them.
But I feel grateful, all those record-breaking things, to the biggest albums, to those No. Is, I still feel grateful. I’m a guy who used to sit in my living room and listen to my father play Ray Charles. My mother used to wake me up at 3 in the morning, ‘Michael, he’s on TV, he’s on TV!’ I’d run to the TV and James Brown would be on TV. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
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Click Here: Read Part 1
Click Here: Watch a Video of the Photo Shoot
Q: Another big moment was the Motown 25 performance …
A: I was at the studio editing “Beat It”, and for some reason I happened to be at Motown Studios doing it–I had long left the company. So they were getting ready to do something with the Motown anniversary, and Berry Gordy came by and asked me did I want to do the show, and I told him ‘NO.’ I told him no. I said no because the Thriller thing, I was building and creating something I was planning to do, and he said, ‘But it’s the anniversary …’ So this is what I said to him. I said, ‘I will do it, but the only way I’ll do it is if you let me do one song that’s not a Motown song.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘Billie Jean’. He said, ‘OK, fine.’ I said, ‘You’ll really let me do “Billie Jean?” He said, ‘Yeah.’
So I rehearsed and choreographed and dressed my brothers, and picked the songs, and picked the medley. And not only that, you have to work out all the camera angles. I direct and edit everything I do. Every shot you see is my shot. Let me tell you why I have to do it that way. I have five, no, six cameras. When you’re performing–and I don’t care what kind of performance you are giving–if you don’t capture it properly, the people will never see it. It’s the most selfish medium in the world. You’re filming WHAT you want people to see, WHEN you want them to see it, HOW you want them to see it, what JUXTAPOSITION you want them to see. You’re creating the totality of the whole feeling of what’s being presented, in your angle and your shots. ‘Cause I know what I want to see. I know what I want to go to the audience. I know what I want to come back. I know the emotion that I felt when I performed it, and I try to recapture that same emotion when I cut and edit and direct.
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Q: How did it all start?
A: Motown was preparing to do this movie called The Wiz … and Quincy Jones happened to be the man who was doing the music. Now, I had heard of Quincy before. When I was in Indiana as a child, my father used to buy jazz albums, so I knew him as a jazz musician.
So after we had made this movie–we had gotten pretty close on the film, too; he helped me understand certain words, he was really father-like–I called him after the movie, out of complete sincerity–’cause I’m a shy person, ESPECIALLY then, I used to not even look at people when they were talking to me, I’m not joking–and I said, ‘I’m ready to do an album. Do you think … could you recommend anybody who would be interested in producing it with me or working with me?’ He paused and said, ‘Why don’t you let ME do it?’ I said to myself, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.’ Probably because I was thinking that he was more my father, kind of jazzy. So after he said that, I said, ‘WOW, that would be great.’ What’s great about working with Quincy, he let’s you do your thing. He doesn’t get in the way.
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We found this article on nymag.com – Dated July 2008
Michael Jackson, who asked Ne-Yo to write songs for his comeback album. “Yeah, Michael’s putting together a new album, and I’m helping him out with it,” he confirmed. According to Ne-Yo, Jackson himself called to get him onboard. “I actually hung up on him because I thought someone was playin’,” he said. “‘Who’s this?’ [high voice] ‘This is Michael Jackson.’ Click. Then his representative called back. ‘This is Peter Lopez. I have Michael Jackson on the phone.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Are you serious?’ And then I apologized for the next ten minutes. Any comedian who has ever made fun of Michael Jackson was right on. Sad but true. He does have a very high, not very manly voice.”
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REMOVE THAT SCARF! YOUR HANDSOME!
Awww…
