Jermaine Dupri talks about finding success in the music business and life itself.
Courtesy photo
By Bill Vaughan
Entertainment Writer
Music industry giant JERMAINE DUPRI continues to keep active these days as an executive producer, along with hip hop superstar Drake of Starz’ “Magic City: An American Fantasy,” an immersive five-part docuseries that brings viewers inside the famed Atlanta club and features an oral history from the A-listers (including 2 Chainz, Shaquille O’Neal, Quavo, Killer Mike and Big Boi).
Back in 2016, Dupri, whose hit Lifetime summer show “The Rap Game” was finding stars such as Latto while teaching the ropes of the music industry, dropped some science to TASTY CLIPS.
The mastermind behind two of the most successful young hip hop acts ever — Kris Kross and Bow Wow — wanted aspirants to know it’s not as easy as they think.
“A lot of kids have that mentality right now because we have so many camera phones and YouTube and stuff,” he explained. “They just think they can get on [social media] and rap and make it. It don’t work like that.”
Though incorporating the parents into the show wasn’t his idea, Dupri came to believe they brought dynamics to TV that we haven’t seen.
“People are always using Michael Jackson’s dad as a bad example,” he said of his onetime potential father-in-law via Janet Jackson. “I tell people all the time there’s no way in hell that Joe Jackson was a bad man because every person in that house became a superstar.”
He likened Rich Homie Quan forgetting Biggie Smalls’ lyrics on VH1’s “Hip Hop Honors” for measure.
“Rehearsal is a serious word when you’re an entertainer,” warned Dupri. “[A national TV] platform is not where you mess up at. You need a Joe Jackson in your life and that wouldn’t have happened.”
Regarding that awards show, Dupri felt that omitting Sequence, the pioneering 70s rap group featuring Angie Stone, wasn’t a big deal.
“I’m not sure that people even know what that is,” he said. “She should’ve been there probably up on the stage but Foxy Brown definitely. It was an era in time when you either had Foxy or Lil Kim. I always say you can’t have a number one without a number two. I feel like the missing presence of Foxy Brown and Nicki Minaj basically was really interesting.”
While working on future chart-toppers, Dupri found it disheartening how good Black music gets categorized.
“If you hear a white person talk about U2, they don’t deem it old school music,” he observed. “One of the things that people were talking about the most at Coachella [which is all young kids] was going to see Guns N Roses. I was with a 17-year-old, and he was like, ‘What song should I be excited about when Ice Cube comes out?’ I’m like damn. The education of our music from the past 10 years is completely lost.”
“Our music business is dying because there’s not enough young energy,” he said. “Every superstar that people talk about now started out when they were kids. Beyoncé, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Usher, Chris Brown. People give me a lot of backlash because I’m working with kids but this is where the music came from. This is where Stevie Wonder came from. This is where Michael Jackson came from.”
Despite being an iconic Atlantan, Dupri admitted even he got the treatment from local police for doing things like parking in the wrong spot.
“[They] pulled up on me and were like, ‘Get the MF out of here. Who do you think are?’ They went crazy. It was four cops in the car, and I was basically (clears throat) by myself. I wasn’t going to go to jail. So I didn’t say anything and just moved the car, but I could definitely understand what’s going on out here. It doesn’t matter who you are. If it happens, it’s going to happen.”
He wanted to share something he learned from a lawyer worth noting:
“If the police fill out their report and anywhere says, I feared for my life and then evidence in any kind of way shows that the cop is telling the truth, he might be lying but they automatically get off. I don’t think people know this and need to pay attention. It’s a law. When people say they can’t understand why the other cops aren’t saying anything about this. That’s why. It’s a law.”
Dupri was also of the belief that protests that spill over to expressways continue to keep putting its participants in hot water.
“I get it but we’re also breaking the law,” he said. “At some point, you got to be smarter, because if not, it continues to look like we don’t know what we’re doing. In anything you do, if you don’t know what you’re doing and the other person knows what they’re doing, they’re going to win.”
For more than 11 years, Bill Vaughan has kept Wave readers up to date with the latest news in entertainment. Now, we are collecting some of those past columns into what we call the Best of Tasty Clips. To contact Vaughan, visit his social media pages on Facebook and Instagram or @tasty_clips, on X @tastyclips, and on LinkedIn to William Vaughan.
