Londell McMillan, The Source’s owner and publisher, was a guest on The Breakfast Club this week. The magazine just released its Power 30 Issue with Charlamagne tha God, Angela Yee, and DJ Envy on the cover, recreating the December 1997 issue featuring The Firm (Nas, AZ, and Foxy Brown).
After sharing with listeners his reasons for featuring “The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show” on The Source this month, McMillan was asked by Charlamagne about Jay Z’s “Caught Their Eyes” lines, where he raps, “I sat down with Prince, eye to eye/He told me his wishes before he died/Now, Londell McMillan, he must be color blind/They only see green from them purple eyes” and “This guy had 'Slave' on his face/You think he wanted the masters with his masters?/You greedy bastards sold tickets to walk through his house/I'm surprised you ain't auction off the casket.”
“Again, you have to ask Hov because I was the guy who got ‘slave’ off his face,” McMillan said at the 14:00 mark in the video above. “Prince hired me to get him out of the contract with Warner Bros. He called me the emancipator. I asked Prince when I first met him, ‘How do we get that slave off your face?’ Prince said, ‘You get me free, I’ll take slave off my face.’”
He then says he told Prince: “Freedom is not free. You think Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass just woke up one day and they want free? We’re going to have to fight for freedom. He said, ‘I’m ready to fight.’ We win and we were successful. I went from his lawyer to his manager to his partner.”
McMillan reiterates Jay’s now famous lines on “Family Feud,” saying that the hip-hop community needs to show more conflict resolution or nobody wins. He elaborated on running Prince’s estate as its business manager at the time (he now manages half of the heirs of the estate), defending his decision to sell tickets for fans to walk through Paisley Park.
“Anyone who knew Prince really knew that Prince left instructions to leave Paisley Park as a museum,” he says at the 16:40 mark. “He left instructions to at least 20, 30 people, so that was a fact. In fact, he started writing out the plans for that.”
“I believe Jay was getting misinformation and information,” he continued. “Jay usually doesn’t get press from things like that. What I’ve seen from my dealings with him. He’s usually a cool guy. I wanted to keep any beefs directly, but if he wants to talk about it privately or publicly. If you want to come up here and talk about it, we can have that conversation.”
He leaves one final thought on Jay’s line at the 18:00 mark. “I could just tell you this. If anybody leaves their family with an estate, you should want somebody like me making sure that we are protecting it and we are monetizing it so your family doesn’t lose it. We created almost $100 million in less than nine months so the IRS don’t back up with a big yellow truck to the purple building and take his assets. Who does that? So when people talk about seeing green in the purple eyes, me being able to generate revenue, make money, that’s a great thing.”
You can watch the full interview above.
