Ja Rule can clearly stand the heat and won’t get out the kitchen, because he is standing firm on Fyre Festival being a great idea.
The 43-year-old rapper appeared on The Breakfast Club Wednesday morning alongside Murder Inc. founder Irv Gotti to discuss their projects, including Growing Up Hip-Hop and Tales, the latter of which is returning for a second season in July and will apparently premiere with Kanye West (though Irv wouldn’t explicitly say his name, he heavily hinted at it and DJ Envy easily guessed it. Seriously, Irv was as subtle as The Hulk.).
Other than that, since Ja was in the building...well, you know why we’re here. For the mess! That’s right, Fyre Festival was a primary topic of the conversation, for sure.
Basically, Ja’s position is this: Fyre was a great concept with bad execution.
“Here’s the real shit. This is real shit. The Fyre Festival was an amazing idea,” he exclaimed. “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. It just—the execution was extremely bad, man,” Ja continued. Ja gave insight into his initial idea, creating a festival with “five elements” of earth, citing water and wood as examples. Hence the name, “Fyre.”
Ja also talked about how difficult it was being the “face” of the Fyre Festival and confirmed he hadn’t spoken with co-founder Billy McFarland nor does he have any plans to speak to him again.
“I’m mad at Billy,” he admitted. “He lied to me, man. He lied to me in a lot of ways.”
Throughout the interview, he continued to distance himself from the nit and grit of the execution, which resulted in a full-blown shouting debate between him and DJ Envy on whether or not that was his voice during the team conference call featured in Netflix’s doc, Fyre. As if Ja doesn’t have one of the most recognizable voices in hip-hop, but okay.
Overall, Ja is about that rebranding life and wants folks to focus on ICONN instead.