The drug dealer Ja Rule idolised before hip hop: “My first dream”
Ja Rule’s success in music and, to a lesser extent, in acting, is the stuff of dreams. It’s the sort of thing that young kids aspire to, but when he was a teenager, he had his eye on other forms of success.
An adolescent Ja pined for success for its own sake, regardless of how he achieved it. Whatever path could bring him prosperity and status is the one he wanted to travel down, and the most obvious avenue for that he could see at the time was drug-dealing.
Ja spoke about this during a feature for Interview magazine in 2013, admitting that drug-dealing was what he wanted to concern himself with for a period during his youth. “My first dreams and aspirations of being successful was probably that I wanted to be a successful drug dealer,” he said. “I wanted to be Nino Brown.”
Nino Brown is the drug kingpin at the centre of the movie New Jack City, released in 1991. Ja was a teenager when the film came out, and he seemed to really idolise the character, who was played by Wesley Snipes.
But Ja eventually came to realise that, despite how it seemed in the film, building a drug empire and sitting at the top of it was probably harder than it looked. Once he came to that conclusion, that’s when he decided to “fall back” onto something else.
What Ja fell back on was music, followed later by movies. These pursuits that, ultimately, would make Ja a star were, during this adolescent period, his back-up plan. He’d actually wanted to get rich dealing.
That’s not to say that he hadn’t liked performing as a young person. He recalled being a child and putting on little plays alongside his cousins, or recreating Michael Jackson routines. He loved the feedback from doing that.
“Feeling that energy from the people clapping,” he recalled, “like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you did such a good job. You were so good doing Mike.’ Feeling that, I was like, ‘You know what? I think I like this.’”
Ja Rule liked feeling “energised” from performing, and he liked being complimented for doing it well. But as he got a little bit older, he realised how much work it would take to get good enough to make it. That’s when he started pining to be a drug dealer, but once he realised that was hard, too, he pivoted back to performance as an aspiration. That’s what he stuck with, and it worked out rather nicely for him.