GQ on March 24 published Exclusive: The Jay-Z Interview and two of the exchanges with interviewer Frazier Tharpe are relevant to Atlantic Yards and the Nets.
Q. You also have a discipline of almost shrugging off any kind of perception of a loss. “The Nets could go 0 for 82 and I’d look at you like, This shit gravy.”
A. Yeah, because it’s all wins. If I had point-zero-zero-zero-one of the Nets, I won. It’s like: I had ownership in a basketball team. In Brooklyn. That actually relied on me heavily to get to Brooklyn, right? So yeah, I didn’t win the championship with the Nets. I still won.
That is true, as we've known for a while, thanks especially to an unskeptical New York Times article Aug. 16, 2012, With Arena, Rapper Rewrites Celebrity Investors’ Playbook. My critique.
And yes, Jay-Z still won. As I once wrote, in Jay-Z’s hip-hop of distraction, "you can't hustle a hustler." Yes, I wrote that before I knew the Jay-Z line, "Can’t out-hustle a hustler, you can’t outplay a player."
Q. You once said that you were talking to the Russian billionaire that you were doing business with the Nets, Mikhail Prokhorov, and he revealed that there was an even higher floor in this hotel that you both stayed at that you weren’t aware of. And that lesson to you was that there’s always a higher floor to climb. Do you feel like you’ve reached the highest floor now or are there still floors to climb?
A. The next step is owning the building—No, you’re staying at my hotel. There’s always a next level as long as you’re alive. I think as long as you stay curious in life, no matter what it is, you’ll stay fed. As long as you stay curious, you won’t ever get stuck. If we stay curious, there’s always going to be another level.
Q. You also have a discipline of almost shrugging off any kind of perception of a loss. “The Nets could go 0 for 82 and I’d look at you like, This shit gravy.”
A. Yeah, because it’s all wins. If I had point-zero-zero-zero-one of the Nets, I won. It’s like: I had ownership in a basketball team. In Brooklyn. That actually relied on me heavily to get to Brooklyn, right? So yeah, I didn’t win the championship with the Nets. I still won.
That is true, as we've known for a while, thanks especially to an unskeptical New York Times article Aug. 16, 2012, With Arena, Rapper Rewrites Celebrity Investors’ Playbook. My critique.
And yes, Jay-Z still won. As I once wrote, in Jay-Z’s hip-hop of distraction, "you can't hustle a hustler." Yes, I wrote that before I knew the Jay-Z line, "Can’t out-hustle a hustler, you can’t outplay a player."
Q. You once said that you were talking to the Russian billionaire that you were doing business with the Nets, Mikhail Prokhorov, and he revealed that there was an even higher floor in this hotel that you both stayed at that you weren’t aware of. And that lesson to you was that there’s always a higher floor to climb. Do you feel like you’ve reached the highest floor now or are there still floors to climb?
A. The next step is owning the building—No, you’re staying at my hotel. There’s always a next level as long as you’re alive. I think as long as you stay curious in life, no matter what it is, you’ll stay fed. As long as you stay curious, you won’t ever get stuck. If we stay curious, there’s always going to be another level.
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