Suge Knight is back with more stories about the inner workings of the music industry, and he has now added Jimmy Iovine to his growing blacklist .
The latest episode of Collect Call With Suge Knight aired on Saturday (December 9) via Dave Mays’ Breakbeat Media, and it features the gangsta rap mogul talking about Death Row Records’ partnership with Interscope, which acquired exclusive distribution rights to the Hip Hop label’s material in the early ’90s.
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At one point in the half-hour segment, the Compton native recalled approaching Iovine to collect his archives, meaning “your masters, any songs you put out, any songs you didn’t put out.”
Suge continues with his memory: With corroboration from then-head of business affairs David Cohen, Iovine explained to Knight that some of the material he was asking for was no longer in their possession. In Knight’s memory, the Interscope execs’ story was that 2Pac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, allegedly showed up with some gunmen and seized any recordings with him on it, including songs the late rapper was featured on and projects he had merely contributed to.
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Though he didn’t provide any updates on the current whereabouts of the masters, the 58-year-old convict does remember Afeni visiting him in prison and informing him that “they” told her Suge had her son killed.
“I said, ‘Who is they?’” he remembers. “She said, ‘The mothafuckers at Interscope.’ So she never told me who and the light finally clicked on. Oh, I get it. So muthafuckas trying to work me. They gonna turn her against me, they gonna lie on me, and the saddest thing about that shit — she died without knowing the truth.”
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Though Knight didn’t explicitly name Iovine as the person he suspects of influencing Pac’s mother, the episode he said it on is titled “Jimmy LIE-Vine.”
HipHopDX has reached out to representatives of Jimmy Iovine and Interscope for comment.
Listen to Suge explain the sequence of events at the 9:30 mark below:
Suge Knight is on a mission to expose the people who he believes took advantage of 2Pac, though he recently took a moment to recognize the uncelebrated heroes behind one of his former artist’s biggest hits.
In last week’s installment of the podcast, the former Death Row Records boss talked about how “California Love” has generated tons of “diamond money,” considering how the people responsible for a lot of its success never got their dues.
After crediting DJ Quik and J-Flexx for laying out the song’s blueprint, he explained that Dr. Dre and ’Pac did their bits — yet, it was lacking something, which is when the Southern California entrepreneur approached funk legend Roger Troutman.
“The minute Roger walked in that studio, I gave him 50 racks cash off the top,” he recalled, before explaining that the Zapp legend was facing financial hardships at the time. “The minute he told me his situation, I gave him another 100 racks, so I gave him 150 racks before he even hooked up the talk box.
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“That muthafucka went in that muthafucka and made magic because I brought him in to make the magic […] so when Roger did that, I gave him another 200 grand just to be in the video. That made ‘California Love’ — so ’Pac wrote his verse, J-Flexx wrote Dre’s verse.”
