I caught up with Steve Rifkind during his stay in London. It was a great honour for me to sit down and interview someone who has done alot for Hip Hop music.

In this first part of the interview, I get Steve to break down the Duck Seazon lyrics where RZA says “Stev Rifkind must be sniffin”.

We then get onto speaking about Steve’s first encounters with artists.

He explains how Havoc (Mobb Deep) lit up a blunt during their firs meeting and caused a fire alarm to go off.

I ask him to talk about the first time he met Melanie Fiona and how he thought her manager was “breathtakingly beautiful” and at the time he had just turned single!

The Loud & SRC founder also describes a 16 year old Dame Dash as a “cocky motherfucker” who came into Steve’s office shouting and screaming with his cousin. Rifkind once thought Roc-A-Fella would be his competition.

Steve Rifkind tried revealed he tried to sign Jay-Z but was was frustrated that the Chairman of BMG wouldn’t sign Jigga that he threw everything off the Chairman’s desk.

There’s also a great story about Steve Rifkind throwing a chair threw a window over a Wu Tang record and being led out of the building in handcuffs.

Part 2 coming tomorrow. It includes stories about Akon, Tupac and did the Wu Tang Clan set up Steve by placing a Phantom intern at the label?

Tags: dame dash, Handcuffed, Interview, Jay-Z, Music, Steve Rifkind, Wu Tang Clan

Tags: 24 Hour, dame dash, Hip-Hop, Karate School, Music, Rap

The video is short but my guess is the exchange took place backstage at the Wireless Festival, Hyde Park when Jay headlined it in 2008 (I might be wrong!).

A SNEAK PEAK SNIPPET OF DAMON DASH AND MEMPHIS BLEEK REUNITING IN LONDON AFTER YEARS OF NOT SPEAKING! JAY Z FEET AWAY IN HIS TRAILER…WHOLE VIDEO TO BE DROPPED SOON…
MICHAELSTERLINGEATON.COM

Tags: dame dash, Hip-Hop, Memphis Bleek, Music, Rap, Video

Tags: dame dash, Hip-Hop, Music, Swizz Beatz, Video

Damn a “wack world cold” must be tough to get over!

With the launch of his new downtown mecca, DD172—playfully dubbed by Mos Def as the “24 Karate School”—Dash has surrounded himself with a team eager to work outside of the system he calls “Wack World” and get back to a time of creating simply for the sake of being creative. His latest endeavor is Blakroc, a collaboration with rock group the Black Keys and an onslaught of hip-hop heavyweights, including Mos Def, Jim Jones, Raekwon and the RZA (read our full review here).

At DD172 we caught up with Dash, sitting alongside like-minded artists Mos and Curren$y, who are working with New Orleans rapper and producer Jay Electronica on another Dash-directed project called Center Edge Territory. In this extensive interview, Dash talks about Blakroc, DD172 and his new outlook on making music.

Tags: Black Keys, dame dash, Dame Dash Interview With Time Out (Video), Hip-Hop, Interview, Mos Def, Music, New York, NYC, Rap, Time Out, Video

Tags: Beanie Sigel, beans, Beef, dame dash, Dame Dash - "I Love Jay, Hip-Hop, I Love Beans (Video), Jay-Z, mtv, Rap

Tags: dame dash, Hip-Hop, Jay-Z, Memphis Bleek, Music, Rap, Rocawear 10th Anniversary (Video)

More excerpts from Jay’s interview with XXL. Lowkey over at his Sound Off Blog at BET.com posted up Hova speaking on Damon Dash and the signing of Kanye West.

Jay-Z on not receiving credit for Kanye West, Ne-Yo, Rihanna & Young Jeezy..

“Let’s first clear this thing about Dame and Kanye and all of us. We all had a conversation about Kanye and whether to sign him. No one knew what would become of Kanye. Not Dame, not me not Biggs. So we all sat down and said, “Let’s at least sign so we can keep the tracks in-house. It’s only good business.” And Dame said, “We can put Beans and Cam, surround him and make this type of album.” I wasn’t saying don’t sign Kanye, I was saying, at least keep the beats in-house, if anything. I don know. Maybe, maybe not. Let’s keep him here. Dame came up with the idea of surrounding him with Roc-A-Fella artists on his album, which never came out, ’cause when the album came in, everyone was like, “Oh this is good.” He stood on his own. If anything, I should be credited for wanting to sign him for his tracks. So even if Dame did sign him, he was gone at that time. I engineered those album. In my years there, even if Tina Davis signed Ne-Yo, she was gone. They were gonna drop Ne-Yo until Ty-Ty [Tyran Smith; former Def Jam VP of A&R] put his hand up and said, “I’ll do that project”.” So there’s no Ne-Yo if I’m not there. I scrapped on of his videos that no one knows about, pulled Hype Williams, pulled June Ambrose, my stylist, made the “So Sick” video, and he’s outta here. Rihanna, there’s just no getting around that. So in three years, I’ve worked on Kanye, Ne-Yo and Rihanna. I don’t even wanna talk about the Fab record that was mine ["Money Goes, Honey Stay (When The Money Goes Remix)" off Fab's latest LP, "Loso's Way], Jeezy doing “Go Crazy (Remix)” in my office. It doesn’t even make sense to [list] like that, cause it’s childish.”

Jay-Z on the business mindset of Dame Dash…..

“I don’t want people to take this wrong, but if that’s my opinion. that’s my opinion. Dame is good at starting something. I don’t know if he gets in his own way at a certain point. You know, the fights you had coming up aren’t the same fights when you’re on a different level. What would happen is, a lot of times, I would have to go fix. You know, it was time-consuming, going back and just doing three meetings, when we could have had one. Nothing got accomplished, because everyone was screaming at each other. It got to a point…..John Meneilly (Jay’s manager) is not even the same type of thing.”

Thanks to Lowkey 

Tags: dame dash, Execerpt, Fabolous, Interview, Jay-Z, Jay-Z Speaks On Dame Dash & The Signing Of Kanye We, Kanye West, News, Signing, XXL, Young Jeezy