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Why did the album become part of the Blueprint trilogy? These are songs that sound very different from each other, like Thank You, the clarinets on D.O.A., the greatness of Empire State Of Mind. I have written the songs only for the sake of creating music. The album don’t follow no trends or gimmicks, it just expresses my truth. It has that classic relation to music as an artform. You described Blueprint III as a new classic. The biggest asset us humans have is honesty. Truth and feelings have no gender, colour or age. They lose out on the details, stuff that kids can sense, they’re doing themselves a disservice and they become irrelevant. Repeatedly, some artists try to make music for 15 year olds and that is no way to express their true self. Many people go through the same thing and they can feel you are honest and follow you because of that, through good times and bad. Then you have to express that truth to an audience. You have to find your real you – who you are inside.
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Yeah, a lot of rappers from your generation are not around today. To have had a solid career and being important to hiphop culture. What achievement do you take most pride from? I meet him at the plush Café Opera in Stockholm, a city he first visited in 1996 for a gig that got him a jacket and roughly 1000 Euro in a paper bag. The first album released on his new label Roc Nation. More or less exactly to the date eight years later he released his eleventh album Blueprint III.
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Two weeks after September 11th New York, where I was living at the time, was still paralysed and I saw Jay-Z open his concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom with the words “I dropped the same day as the Twin Towers!” The album featured the smooth sounds of the then-unknown Kanye West as producer of some its tracks, most notably the hit single Izzo (H.O.V.A.) and the Bobby Blue Bland-sampling Heart Of The City. His biggest feat to date, though, remains creating a legendary hiphop album: The Blueprint, released just about the same time as the second aircraft hit the World Trade Centre. But not only that – he is record company mogul with his own Roc-A-Fella label, and Universal subsidiary Def Jam, he is behind an expanding clothing empire in Rocawear, he owns basketball team New Jersey Nets, the hip sports bar chain 40/40 Club and a new publishing and entertainment venture, Roc Nation. Now, 13 years on, Jay-Z is a platinum selling artist with more numbers ones than Elvis. In 1996 Shawn Corey Carter emerged as a rapper and a promising lyricist.