Joey Badass opened up about his connections to fellow New York rap legends Jay-Z and 50 Cent during a Red Bull interview.
The Columbia-signed rapper was offered a deal with Roc Nation back in the 2010s but passed on signing, according to the interview published Tuesday (May 13). Joey also admitted he sometimes wonders how that deal might have played out.
“I didn’t necessarily opt to go the indie route; it was a chain of communication that I didn’t have any part in,” he told Red Bull.
At the time, the “Sorry Not Sorry” rapper was just 17 and called the chance to sign with Hov a “dream” and the “highest honor you can have.”
“Jay is my favorite rapper, even to this day, and within a year of being in the game he wanted to sign me,” Joey remembered. “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.”
But Joey also found a mentor in 50 Cent, who produces the Starz crime drama Power Book III: Raising Kanan, where the Brooklyn native stars. Joey called Fifty a “very interesting individual,” which initially caught him off guard.
“Not that I didn’t think he was smart, but I think he’s much smarter than people may think,” Joey said, adding that Fif is “very multidimensional.”
“He reminds me a lot of myself, like how he thinks. It was really dope to have some one-on-one time with him to understand his level of thought,” he continued.
Joey has previously discussed his meeting with Jay-Z, like during his 2016 appearance on Sirius XM’s Shade 45, where he talked about studying Jay’s 2010 book Decoded.
“There’s this one chapter in there where [Jay Z] went to meet with Russell Simmons to sign with Def Jam. He said his only thought sitting across the table from Russell Simmons was Damn, I don’t wanna be signed to this nigga, I wanna be this nigga,'” Joey recalled around the 3-minute mark of the video below. “I kinda had that same perspective. But shit, shoutout to Jay, man, because he was on it before a lot of people.”
