Jay Z, Dame Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke grew Roc-A-Fella Records into a major music industry force in the 1990s and 2000s.
During an interview with Complex, Biggs says that the label was took notice of another Rap figure while crafting what would become Jay Z’s second album, 1997’s In My Lifetime, Vol. 1.
“We were following Puff [Daddy] at that time,” Biggs says. “We were following what they were doing, and then Hype put all those funny cameras on us and the shiny stuff.”
But where Jay Z had accumulated street cred upon the initial release of 1996’s Reasonable Doubt, he endured backlash after the “shiny” video for In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 single “Sunshine.”
AD LOADING...
“It was corny,” Biggs says. “[Laughs.] We know that. We look back and laugh. We all make mistakes. But the body of work was good, and that’s what’s important. We still had songs like ‘Streets Is Watching,’ ‘Face Off,’ and ‘Where I’m From’ on there.”
Later in Roc-A-Fella’s run, the imprint signed Kanye West. But the imprint’s parent company, Def Jam Recordings, didn’t support the Chicago rapper-producer’s vision.
“I had actually picked ‘All Falls Down’ as the second single, which was the biggest song on the album,” Biggs says. “Kanye picked ‘Through the Wire, but I knew it was a hit, so I chased it. Def Jam didn’t want to do anything with that song, so I went and got an independent company called Don’t Think Twice and they broke the record for us.”
Roc-A-Fella was also duped by a then-aspiring artist named Beanie Sigel.
AD LOADING...
“A guy named Sadiq and the late Real Rolla brought Beanie to the table when we were in the studio recording a Jay and Too $hort track,” Biggs says. “Beans must’ve kicked 200 bars. We had never seen something like that before. He didn’t stop rapping. Me and Dame went and got Jay, and Beanie rapped again, and Jay was like, ‘We gotta sign this guy.’ Unbeknownst to us, those were the only raps he had. Beanie had only wrote three raps and those were the ones he spit. On the tape he says, ‘Yeah, I fooled them, they think I’m a rapper.’ [Laughs.] So when we had him in the studio, he didn’t know what bars were or how to write a song. He only knew how to write those long verses. We showed him how to count bars and all that.”
