Billionaire rapper Jay-Z says his success isn’t about “selling out.” It’s about getting paid.
In a wide-ranging interview with GQ to celebrate the forthcoming 30th anniversary of his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt,” Jay-Z was asked to respond to pushback about his wealth.
“People throw ‘capitalist’ at you in a derogatory sense,” GQ editor Frazier Tharpe said.
The rapper and entrepreneur responded by saying he simply operates — and thrives — within the existing system. He also criticized the catch-22 of trying to make money in the music industry.
“The only thing I heard coming up was the American dream. You could make it, if you pull yourself up by the bootstraps. I heard that my entire life — until we started being successful. Then it was like: You’re selling out because you’re making money,” Jay-Z said.
He described romanticization of the starving-artist trope as a “mind game,” adding, “I’m not going for that.”
“I make art first and then I make sure that I’m compensated for my art. I didn’t get here by taking advantage of people or taking advantage of the loopholes in the system, or some wrinkle in a capitalist structure,” Jay-Z continued. “That structure exists; I just see the world for what it is, not for what I want it to be. I’m a realist. It’s not idealistic. People speak about the world how they want to see it. You’re never going to win like that.”
Jay-Z was alluding to the leftist refrain that there’s no such thing as a “good” billionaire, an idea that suggests amassing so much wealth requires exploiting other people’s labor, and that hoarding it fuels inequality.
Later in the interview, Jay-Z explicitly pushed back on this dichotomy, saying “people behave the way they want to behave” regardless of how much money they have.
“Your morality defines who you are. Your morality is not defined by a dollar amount. And if so, what is that dollar amount? When does it start? If it’s a cutoff like ‘all millionaires are bad,’ at 999,000 I’m good? It can’t be that way. It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I got successful the hard way, in spite of the way the system is set up.”
“With that success, I’ve done things with my reach that I wanted to do that was helpful for a lot of people,” he continued, adding, “A person with more money can do more good. It’s a choice.”
In 2019, Forbes reported that Jay-Z had become hip-hop’s first billionaire. Current estimates put his net worth closer to $3 billion, thanks to a valuable discography and a vast network of business ventures, including a record label, a streaming service, a sports management company, and multiple liquor brands. He parlayed that success into an influential partnership with the NFL and the league’s nonprofit organization, Inspire Change.
Jay-Z has since been joined on music’s list of billionaires by his Roc Nation signee, Rihanna; his wife, Beyoncé; and his industry friend, Taylor Swift.
‘Valuable things should be paid for’
Swift, who’s faced similar criticisms about her capitalism, has expressed similar beliefs about art and compensation — particularly in the streaming era, which has dramatically shrunk individual album sales in favor of sweeping subscription structures.
In 2014, Swift told fans that the rise of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music devalued her work and that of other artists.
“In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace,” Swift wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
Swift continued,”Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.”
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