He Watches Every YouTube Rapper
Young Guru: “Jay-Z has probably watched every SMACK DVD, Grind Time battle, freestyle, and every battle that has ever been on YouTube. If you ever battle in any situation that has any remote type of promotion, he’s seen it. He calls me like, ‘Please come watch this battle.’ Jay watches all of them. I mean all of them. Every battle that has ever been on.
“Jay watches these dudes freestyle on YouTube. Like, if you’re a battle MC from Philly, you may not have been in a battle but you just get on YouTube and start rapping, Jay watches those religiously. It’s just the weirdest thing in the world but he really loves it to the point where I’m like, ‘Yo, turn it off.’”
Him and Beyoncé Leave Restaurants Separately
Young Guru: “Jay doesn’t lust for the limelight. He ain’t want all this nonsense of having to leave restaurants at a different time than [Beyoncé] because [the paparazzi] get more money if they snap both of them together. That’s so corny. He just wants to go and eat but he’s gotta think about dumb shit like that now. They can’t walk out the restaurant together. How dumb is that? But it’s reality.”
He’s Nice At Basketball
Young Guru: “[When we were recording The Blueprint 3] Kanye was like, ‘I just bought the crib in Hawaii. Come through, I’ll have the cook cook for us and we’ll go run ball before we hit the studio.’ We get up, me and Jay go over there, we eat breakfast, Kanye’s showing us this nice new crib, and then we go out and play ball.
“It wasn’t even like we shut down or rented a whole gym. We just rode around, found an outside court at some kid’s school, and we played ball. The kids looked outside and was like, ‘Oh shit that’s Kanye and Jay-Z playing ball on our court.’ We all went out and had a nice little exercise.
“Jay is absolutely nice at ball. He’s got a nice 12-foot jumper. He knows the game. He’s smart about the game. For Kanye and them it’s more exercise; they’re not ballers.
“I came from playing ball; I played ball in high school and college. For me, it’s like I’m super out of shape but I can’t let Kanye and Don C. beat me in basketball. I gotta use what I know to win the game. But that game was more about getting together and brotherhood thing.”
Jay Lets Young Guru Keep All His Music
Young Guru: “That’s part of where my job extends beyond normal engineering because once Jay got comfortable with me, it was more than ‘Record and mix my albums.’ It became ‘Oversee my music.’ That means, I hold it all.
Jay doesn’t want any of his music on any other drives but my hard drive. If it leaks, it’s on me.
“First of all, Jay doesn’t want any of his music on any other drives but my hard drive. If it leaks, it’s on me. For Jay, it’s safer to have me as his central base versus it being scattered all over the city.
“Whether I mix them or not, I gather all the mixes. If Timbaland’s guy mixed this and Pharrell mixed this, I got all the mixes. I go present all the mixes to our mastering guy. I sit with the mastering guy doing the tweeks and EQing, doing the spacing in-between the records, all of that stuff. And we put the whole album together.
“If CBS is putting ‘Heart of the City’ in the beginning of some cop show, they’ll come to me and be like, ‘Can I get the instrumental TV track?’ because they know I hold everything. If he’s in Rocawear and we need a voice-over, call Guru. It’s those type things.
“That all falls into my responsibility. It’s gone beyond the normal thing. It’s become a gig to take care of Jay-Z’s musical world.”
His Adlibs Are Live
Young Guru: “If you hear Jay-Z say, ‘Guru, tell that girl open that Ace’ or ‘Turn the lights down,’ on a song, he’s really talking [to people in the studio]. Like on Scarface’s ‘Guess Who’s Back,’ when he’s talking in the beginning and he’s like, ‘Gu turn my headphones down, my headphones distorting,’ that’s all real.”
He Does One Take Because He Memorizes His Raps
Young Guru: “Jay memorizes his raps before he gets in the booth. That’s all it is. Too many MCs write their raps in the booth. Jay [doesn’t write his rhymes] down, but he memorizes and says the rap 50,000 times before he even thinks about stepping in the booth.
I tell everybody, you can write your records at home, you can write your records in a car, you can write your rhymes anywhere. You shouldn’t be spending $150 an hour to be writing a song. The studio is to record music.
“By the time he steps in the booth, he’s said it so many times he already memorized the record and he’s been so particular about the bounce and the flow that it’s not hard for him to do it in one take.
“He writes and critiques his records more than any other MC that I’ve ever seen and goes line for line: ‘Is this too complicated or not complicated enough? Am I over-rapping it? Am I not giving them enough tricks?’
“All while we’re out here kicking it, smoking, doing whatever we’re doing, he’s saying to you, ‘This is the record. This is what I’m gonna say Gu,’ and he says it 80,000 times. When he taps you and goes, ‘Yo, I’m ready,’ he’s really ready.
“It saves so much time. It’s about memorizing your raps. I tell everybody, you can write your records at home, you can write your records in a car, you can write your rhymes anywhere. You shouldn’t be spending $150 an hour to be writing a song. The studio is to record music.”
He Occasionally Needs To “Download” His Rhymes
Young Guru: “Jay writes in his head, so we have times where he goes, ‘I need to download.’ He doesn’t call it that, but that’s what I call it. There’s so much stuff in his head that sometimes he just raps to a hi-hat or to a click or to nothing because he’s writing songs and he needs to remember them so he’ll record them. So it’s like, take that out the brain until I need it again. I can put it back in there when I need to say it.
“After we got home from the Watch the Throne tour, Jay was writing and when the New Year started not only did we knock out the song ‘Glory’ for Blue Ivy Carter, but it’s just like, ‘Okay, download. Just put up any beat or give me a click and let me just say these raps so I can just have them. I need to get them out of my mind because I’ve been holding them for two months.’ He does that a lot. He just started going in and it’s like every other day we’d end up with new records.”
It Was Kanye’s Idea To Do “D.O.A.”
Young Guru: “[While recording Blueprint 3, we were in the studio talking] and that turned out to be a two-hour conversation about what’s going on in hip-hop and what we need to be doing.
"Soulja Boy’s record was popping at the time. He becomes the antithesis to what we’re talking about, so we’re referencing him. We’re not saying Soulja Boy is wack but we’re like, ‘Jay is 40. This is what’s going on in hip-hop right now. We can’t do this.’
“That’s how ‘D.O.A.’ came about because Kanye was getting on his rant. People think Jay did that, but Kanye was the person that told him to do that. Kanye was like, ‘No, Jay, you’re 40-something, you need to be the anti to all this other shit that’s going on. You need to be like, ‘No, fuck Auto-Tune and all of that.’”
He Purposefully Fell Back On Watch The Throne
Young Guru: “Watch the Throne, that was Jay’s way of going, ‘Here, here’s the whole project for you to do. I’m gonna fall back and just interject my lines and here and there.’ The concept of that album was wholly directed by Kanye. That’s probably the first time that Jay ever did that but it was on purpose.
“Jay has been wanting to put people out, like, ‘Here, I’m giving you your start.’ But he’s not gonna do the groundwork for you, he’s not gonna run around and make the meetings for you. You’re gonna have to do all that yourself.
“Kanye was the first person that took it, ran with it, and it’s outside of Jay. He loves that so it’s a thing of where now we can both share this responsibility of being hot.
“With Watch the Throne, Kanye put his foot in it. He definitely brought a new style, pushed Jay in terms of styling and where they wanted to go. I think he also just hit the nail on the head by accepting tracks from outside producers that he found was hot.
“Between that and the visual presentation—Kanye is super visual, so having the two stages with the things rising up and down and the lights is Kanye’s vision. When it came to the tour, Jay was like, ‘Nah Guru, let they camp do it.’
“I think that’s why Jay allowed him to do that—and it also allows him to fall back a little bit and have a baby. [Laughs.]”
Jay's Already Working On His Next Album...
Young Guru: “There are maybe four songs so far and most of them are spill over. I don’t wanna say spill-over like they’re throw-aways from Watch The Throne. It’s an incredible beat coming on and Jay being like, ‘No that’s for my album. Hold that one, it’s for me.’ So the ones that were made so far, the beats were made during the Watch The Throne time.
“Now we’re adding on to it, but we haven’t gone back in. We had all this touring stuff. It was the end of the year and we were doing shows. Then the baby came. We literally went in to do the song for Blue Ivy and he hasn’t been back since. He’s definitely enjoying daddy mode right now.”
