DX: What ever happened with the situation with Warner Brothers?
JM: The situation with Warner Brothers, just really didn’t work. After the “No, No, No,” single, the remix, and the promo I did for the album when we got ready for the second single I recorded my album kind of fast with the Warner Brothers situation. That deal went through kind of fast and it really wasn’t no kind of stalling with that. “No, No, No,” was playing on the radio for about a week, next thing I know we got people coming to the studio. It was like all these people from Warner Brothers want to talk to you, they're interested, they want to hear your music. I played them like three songs they was feeling the “No, No, No” and the other three songs a couple days later we got bottles of champagne and contracts. It really happened that fast and the next week I’m at the Warner Brothers office in Hollywood staying out on Sunset [Boulevard]. I ain’t never been to L.A. a day in my life, but I’m out on Sunset looking at the Golden Girls set and all that. [Laughs] That shit switched up so much, but at the end of the day they didn’t really know where to take me. You gotta think, I’m a dude from Harlem, and Warner Brothers is not really known for rap, they just like music. Most of the people that was working my project was white; I’ma be real with you. The people who used to roll with me was black, that might have controlled the little shit, but the main people who did shit like the artwork, this and that, the way the cover is gonna look they was just musical people. So that kind of didn’t fall through and they didn’t know where to take me. My first single was a Jamaican song, I’m from New York, I’m from Harlem, I’m a young battle rapper, and my first single is like a Jamaican sampler as I shot the video in Jamaica. It’s like, “Where you go from that?" We knew where we wanted to go, because to us, that was just like a song. Time was going by, and when I think about it now as I was kind of young. I was real impatient with that situation. Now when I think about it I wish I wasn’t that impatient, but it’s a learning lesson.

DX: Do you think the lack of foresight the labels have is coming back to hurt them with poor record sales?
JM: I’m not gonna put that on the majors, because at the end of the day a major is still a major. It’s still a major way for you to make money if you're doing shit on a major level. Independent is good if you know how to pimp it, if you know how to pimp the situation independent is always going to be good. That’s like a nigga hitting you with a brick and you know you got a bunch of niggas you can break it down to. It’s a different story if a nigga hit you with a break and it’s like you just sitting in ya crib looking at it. If you just want get it out, get out! You don’t even know what to do with it you just want to get that shit away from you.

At the end of the day there is a lot of major labels that don’t know what to do. A lot of these niggas working at the label is young, a lot of these niggas ain’t been listening to rap that long. A lot of these niggas don’t know who Rakim is, they know a Rakim song, they know a Kool G Rap song, a Eazy-E song, a N.W.A. song, they don’t know albums; they don’t know shit. Real talk, I’ve been at different labels and they just people who work. They might be fans of the shit, they might be people who dedicated to doing they work. Those are people who are dedicated to doing they work, but they just don’t know what the fuck they doing. The people who do know what they doing they’ve been doing the shit for so long they feel like it ain’t worth it no more. They feel like it’s no money in sales, it’s no money in music right now all the money is in merchandising and this and that. This is where they mindset is, “I ain’t putting no hard fuckin work into no motherfuckin' album, because I ain’t gonna make no money with that album.” “Now we can do some ringtone shit with iTunes or Sprint.”

DX: You’ve been with Warner Bros, Universal, and now you're with Lil Wayne so do you think this is the right move for you?
JM: I mean you never know, man. It felt like a good situation. Whenever I’m around dude, dude keeps it real. He kept it real within 20 minutes of me being in Miami, he pulled me in the other room and we just had a one-on-one, and from there I just been rocking with him since the beginning of ’08 - in January. Ever since then, I just been rocking with him like and it’s a cool vibe. When we go the to studio, I’ve been in the studio with him for the first time in Atlanta. I’ve been in the studio with him in a bunch of other states, but I really didn’t record nothing. I’m a laid back guy that just be chilling and he one of them dudes that go in the studio at about [eight or nine o'clock at night] and just leave the next day, he might leave ten o’clock in the morning the next day. The kid be in the zone he just walk around putting that shit together and just go in the booth hard. He knows how to do shit, he ain’t just no rapper; that shit is like “Damn!” Continued on page 3 »