Jay-Z: I Almost Leaked ‘Blueprint 3’
In this new video for Forbes , Jay-Z and Warren Buffett discuss topics ranging from philanthropy to how they achieved success. In it, Jay-Z tells a great story: Jay, having signed with Live Nation to form Roc Nation in 2008, still had one more album left on his previous deal with Def Jam. He wound up buying that album, Blueprint 3, from Def Jam and releasing it through his Roc label — but not before he almost released it, free, to the world.
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“The day I flew in from Hawaii [where BP3 was largely recorded], I was doing some recording, and I had an iPod in my pocket on a commercial flight from Hawaii to New York,” Jay-Z says. “I had on jogging pants, and the iPod, with all the music I had recorded, [went] missing — it was on the plane somewhere. So I had to walk into the office the next day and buy an album that might leak the next day. So every day I would wake up and check all the internet places, for like three months.”
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In other Jay-Z news, the rapper has finally set a November 16th release date for his his first book, Decoded , which tells the story of Jay-Z’s life by expanding on some his most famous lyrics. Andy Warhol’s “Rorschach” painting will appear on the cover. “When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics — not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC — are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.”