The Breakfast Club welcomed both Ja Rule and Irv Gotti to the studio for an in-depth discussion on their collaborative business history Wednesday, just days after the 20th anniversary of Murder Inc.'s first release, Ja's debut Venni Vetti Vecci.
After some talk from Gotti on how he and his fellow Growing Up Hip Hop star support each other's separate business ventures, he explained why their relationship works so well. "Me and Rule is like completely different than anything anyone has ever seen in hip-hop," he said. 'This is a true brothership. It doesn't matter. We've never had an argument."
About 17 minutes in, Ja's failed Fyre Festival experiment was brought up, with Gotti noting that he did support his friend through the turmoil. "Billy had me fooled!" Gotti said.
From there, Ja Rule—who's since rebranded the app side of the initial Fyre idea as Icon—reiterated his intentions to give the festival thing another try, only this time with the right people.
"Here's the real shit," he said. "Yes, my brother supported me. The Fyre Festival was an amazing idea. Let's not act like every fucking body wasn't coming to the Fyre Festival. It was fucking done wrong. It was organized bad. The idea of it was dope, the marketing was dope, everything was done very right on that end. The execution was extremely bad, man."
Ja said his ambition, ultimately, was able to shine through the controversy and Billy McFarland's eventual imprisonment thanks to "the purity" of his intentions. "I'm getting calls from the biggest motherfucking n****s who do festivals in the world . . . Sure, I would like to do another festival and do it right because that's what I intended to do in the first motherfucking place," he said.
Around 29 minutes in, Ja explained that he has no intentions of having "any conversations" with McFarland. "I'm mad at Billy," he said. "He lied to me, man. He lied to me in a lot of ways." Ja also pushed back against the melodrama that surrounded the collapsed festival attempt with wealthy "white kids that didn't get their tents that they were fucking promised," comparing it to some of the headlines that popped up surrounding this year's Rolling Loud festival. "When these documentaries coming out?" he asked.
Later, Gotti spoke on how his BET series Tales came together, specifically shouting out the business skills and support of JAY-Z. Since Gotti's name is "all over it," any success from the series ultimately had executives who had previously shunned him due to a run-in with feds claiming a change of heart.
"TIDAL is great right," Gotti said. "TIDAL doesn't have as many subscribers as other things, [but] TIDAL helped me big time get over the hump because, truth be told, Steven Hill only gave me a backdoor pilot . . . That's when I went to HOV with Tidal, 'I'll give you the second window, we'll make it rated R.'" Gotti added that HOV is his "ace in the hole for life," not to mention his presence in a meeting goes a long way toward securing support.
"When he comes in the meeting, they're just excited they got HOV. They're gonna do some business with HOV!" Gotti said.
Gotti also teased a "brand new record" from a "huge, huge artist" who's "controversial" coming July 2 as part of a two-hour Tales season premiere. When Envy suggested this mystery artist could be Kanye West, Gotti didn't exactly deny it. "Let's say it right! He's not acting in it but I have, maybe, a song," Gotti said around 40 minutes into the interview of the "wordly, brotherly" new song.
Catch the full interview up top.
