The reason why Joey Bada$$ never signed with Jay-Z: “I was so young at the time”
It feels like no time has passed since Joey Bada$$ entered the scene and went viral with his throwback hip-hop sound. It was 2012, and songs like ‘Waves’, ‘FromdaTomb$’, ‘Survival Tactics’ and ‘Hardknock’ were convincing hip-hop heads that Joey was the next Messiah.
Joey got his start in 2010 when he uploaded a YouTube video of himself freestyling. The clip made its way onto WorldStarHipHop and caught the attention of Cinematic Music Group president Jonny Shipes, who went on to manage him. Then, he solidified himself with his 1999 mixtape, leading to 2013’s Summer Knights tape and his debut album, B4.Da.$$, in 2015.
The Brooklyn rapper’s career almost looked a lot different. Jay-Z was allegedly looking to manage him during the early days of his career, but it never materialised. Joey doesn’t know all the details about the situation, but he feels it had something to do with his management at the time.
“It was a chain of communication that I didn’t have any part in,” he told Red Bull. “You gotta understand, at that point, I’m a 17-year-old kid from Brooklyn, that was the dream, the highest honour you can have. Jay is my favourite rapper, even to this day, and within a year of being in the game, he wanted to sign me. But he didn’t want to sign me as an artist, he wanted to manage me. I had a manager at the time, and I always wonder if that’s how it got botched.”
While Joey has never mentioned it to Jay-Z, he always considers bringing it up whenever they’re in the same room. “I always see him now and I be wanting to have that conversation, but the time… I feel like the time never permits, like where we at,” he said on The Breakfast Club.
“I was so young at the time, and to me, there was no reason not to sign to Jay-Z. But there was other factors involved and shit like that. so I’m not really sure what exactly happened, like if the communications channels was like sabotaged or something like that. I don’t know.”
Joey met Jay for the first time when he was 17. Crossing paths with his hero made him feel invincible, contributing to the hunger still visible in the rapper at 30. “Get the fuck outta here,” he said about meeting Hov. “Yo, I’m 17, and I already accomplished my wildest dream. [The $1 million] came the year after. I remember going up in that elevator like, ‘If I’m meeting with Jay right now, I can do anything.'”
The ‘Love Is Only a Feeling’ rapper was inspired by a story Jay-Z wrote in his 2010 book Decoded. Instead of being signed by Jay, he wanted to be his equivalent.
“There’s this one chapter in there where [Jay Z] went to meet with Russell Simmons to sign with Def Jam,” he recalled on DJ Whoo Kid’s show. “He said his only thought sitting across the table from Russell Simmons was, ‘Damn, I don’t wanna be signed to this n*gga, I wanna be this n*gga.’ I kinda had that same perspective. But shit, shoutout to Jay, man, because he was on it before a lot of people.”