Jay-Z plays within the system.
However, those abilities have prompted many to call him a capitalist. During an interview with GQ’s Frazier Tharpe, Jay was asked about the implications of being deemed a capitalist, especially as a Black man and an artist, with Tharpe specifically asking about the rapper’s verse on Jay Electronica’s 2020 song, “Universal Soldier.”
“That guilt trip ain't gon' work, don't put your luggage on we / You ain't keep the same energy for the du Pont's and Carnegie's / We was in your cotton fields, now we sittin' on Bs, on me,” Hov raps in the track.
“I think in that verse specifically, the only thing I heard coming up was the American dream until we started being successful. And it was like, wait a minute, you're selling out because you're making money. That was the first thing that was put on musicians,” Jay-Z explained to GQ. “People had this law for the struggling artist. That's a mind game. What we would call it back in the day, tricknology. It was like, ‘Nah, I'm not going for that.’ Like, ‘No, no, 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,” Jay-Z continued. “That's not my reputation. That's not what I do. 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—that structure exists. And 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.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Jay touched on the public perception that billionaires are bad. The 56-year-old has been a billionaire since 2019, becoming the first hip-hop artist to achieve that status.
“People behave the way they want to behave—it’s not a dollar amount. It’s almost like a cop-out. You get to demonize this group of folks without fixing the actual system that exists, that’s in play. [Money] may enhance it or may cause you to act in a way. But you was going to act like that anyway,” he said on the billionaire topic.
