Dame Dash Rags on Jay-Z’s Business Practices

Esquire Magazine has an excellent feature on Jay-Z in its upcoming "People Who Matter" issue that hits newsstands on January 19. In addition to the outlets usual first-person journalism that follows Jay through the post-'Blueprint 3' press grind, there's also some choice quotes from Dame Dash, his former right-hand man. Dash is pretty bitter towards his former partner and demonstrated how he feels they differ as personalities and businessmen.

"I'm indie, and Jay went corporate," says Dash in the piece. The writer, Lisa Taddeo, adds, "Dash says this so many times in the space of an evening that it's likely what he employs at bedtime instead of counting sheep."

Dash goes on to pinpoint the moment when he knew Jay and him weren't going to have much of a future together after so many successful years.

"One day, they [Jay and his businesspeople] brought me to a hotel," explained Dash. "I said, 'Why are we meeting at a hotel?' and it was because they didn't want anyone to hear me yelling. That was the day they told me they didn't want [celebrity photographer] Mario Testino to shoot the ads... Here the Russians were telling me how to cater to my people! I wanted [Rocawear] to be sold at Bergdorf Goodman's, not Dr. Jays... I wanted to do something more tailored, more luxury, more classic, less... throwaway."

This seems to be Dash's biggest bone of contention with Hov. He feels that Jay poses like he creates a vast luxury brand, but the entire enterprise is really an illusion for low quality crap being peddled to his millions of followers that are ready to believe Jay actually wears the low quality jeans they are buying.

Click here to read the full feature.