So, here’s the short of it: When we found out that the twenty-something Forbes writer Zack O’Malley Greenburg was writing a business-focused biography on Michael Jackson, we knew we wanted to talk to him.
He’d broken the news that Michael’s personal debts had been paid up and so we thought he’d be free to chat. He was. We met for lunch (Forbes’ offices are a short walk away from our office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan). Here’s what transpired. Warning, the stuff we talked about concerning Michael (mostly under Zack’s personal embargo) is at the end. Dope insights all around, as you’ll see. We chatted mostly about his his business-centered biography on Jay-Z titled, Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office, newly out in paperback. Hova’s review? “Horrible.” You’ll see that story, later.
One more thing: Dec. 4 is Jay-Z’s birthday. As part of the celebrations, Empire State of Mind’s chapter on Chrysler’s failed “Jay-Z Jeep” will be excerpted on the great Rap Genius.
BlackEnterprise.com: You’ve mentioned repeatedly that you did some big-name interviews with sources that didn’t want to be included in the book once they found out that Jay-Z wasn’t going to be a part of the project. As a journalist, you certainly didn’t have any obligation to honor their wishes. Why did you?
Zack O’Malley Greenburg: That’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have. If something’s not off the record, it’s on the record. You can’t really take something back. That’s the journalist code, anyway. I just felt as though that may be true, morally I felt a bit uncomfortable because in the beginning when I interviewed some of these people I had been pretty optimistic that Jay-Z would be on board. I didn’t want to have mislead them, and I didn’t want to burn bridges in the future with people who had been good sources.
The insights that I got, I was still able to weave into the book one way or the other, just not with a name attached to it. Although some of the names were big names and it would have been nice to say so-and-so was included in the book, would it have added that much more to the actual content? It’s debatable. But I think one of the great things about it being unauthorized in the end was that it forced me to really have to dig around and find some of these stories that ended up being the best chapters in the book.
You tell this story about how you ran into Jay-Z at Made in America — can you tell our readers what happened, and what do you think is so sensitive about the business aspect of his life that made him react the way he did?
I was doing work in the media tent doing interviews. It was the afternoon of the last day and I took a break and went to the porta-potties. The way it was situated, it was the same one on the border of the VIP area and the media area. So you couldn’t go from the media tent to the VIP area. But the porta potty bank served both tents. So I walk out of the porta potty and standing 15 feet away from me are Jay-Z, Beyonce and a whole gaggle of people. And there’s nobody between me and him. I had a few brushes with him, but there was always something — I was, like, well this is my chance. As I did, he turned around and our eyes met. He was walking past me and I say, “Jay, I’m the guy who wrote the book about you. And he kept walking for about ten feet — and I knew he’d heard me, because he was two feet away from me — and as he was about to turn the corner he looked over his shoulder and said, “That book was horrible!†[Laughs.] And then he walked off.
I was elated, because this kind of closed the loop. I didn’t really care what he was going to say, I was just curious to see what he was going to say. What the interaction told me was that obviously he’d read the book, but more importantly that it had gotten to him on some level, because that was not the typical Jay-Z reaction would be to ignore me.
That’s interesting, and I think about that review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant in the Times. Isn’t the worst thing that could have happened to that place is a lukewarm review in the New York Times? It says something that the institution — the writer — felt so strongly about it.
Well, I totally agree. Jay-Z’s typical reaction to things out of his control is to completely ignore them. The fact that he kind of broke character and made kind of an off-handed remark that was not particularly well thought out or incisive suggests to me that it got to him in some way. I wasn’t writing it as a take down piece, if anything it’s a pretty positive book. But there were a few chapters in there where I revealed things that hadn’t been revealed about deals that he didn’t want publicized. He’s been able to maintain this pretty invincible aura and it’s been one of the things that’s been central to his whole persona. And in order to do so he’s done a pretty magnificent job at sweeping things under the rug that don’t fit with that image. Remember the Farmville game on Facebook? Remember Armadale Vodka? I think the deals that don’t work certainly give you valuable
insight, especially in the case of the Jay-Z Jeep, how he was able to extract something positive from a deal that had gone sour. That’s the part that’s being excerpted on Rap Genius on Dec. 4.There are these business deals that you write about that go awry, right, and that’s well done and well documented. But what about his music? His albums are a different proposition that’s subject to scrutiny, and so I’m curious about what you found in your character analysis that gives us an idea about music that’s not well received?
I think the only album he said that he’d do over is Volume 1. I would agree with him on that. That was a function of it being early in his career and he was coming off Reasonable Doubt, which even at the time was being hailed as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. He was deciding to chase the larger pop prize. He slowed down his rhymes … it was just not good. But it still sold better than Reasonable Doubt! And I think it wasn’t until Hard Knock Life that he really perfected the perfect balance. But he argues that Blueprint 2 and Kingdom Come were ahead of their time. Kingdom Come’s theme was, like, “I’m so wealthy, the things I like you haven’t even heard of.†And he got a lot of flack for that, but that’s also a central theme to Watch the Throne, which was enormously well received.
Where did it turn for Jay-Z? When did he become who he is today, this huge, other-worldly mogul who can seemingly do no wrong?
I think he was hoping that moment would come when Kingdom Come was released. I don’t think everyone was quite ready for this notion of Jay-Z, the tastemaking mogul. But 2008 was a big year for him. He made American Gangster, signed the Live Nation deal, married Beyonce, and suddenly you see this guy who’s secretly getting married to the biggest pop star in the world on the top floor of his TriBeca rooftop and that’s when I think it started to be universally understood that he was this trendsetter and mogul. Looking back, it feels like everyone’s always thought of him this way, but I would link it back to 2008.
What did you learn about his business acumen from his lyrics?
As I was researching the book, people would tell me stuff, and I’d think back to lyrics and a name or reference would slap into place. He says, “I gave Doug a grip I lost a flip for five stacks, yeah I’m talking five comma, six zeroes, dot zero, here Doug.” That was when he flipped a coin with Universal CEO Doug Morris to get out of his deal and start the Roc Nation label. He lost the flip for $5 million. That was the negotiation and he lost. So he really tends to leave these little Easter eggs all over the place and you have to unpack them.
What did you find are some of the business implications to his marriage to Beyonce?
People I talked to that know them thinks they have a normal, loving marriage. With that said, it’s also a pretty good business arrangement for both of them. For example, they’re probably always going to be in the front row of any awards show that they go to together, regardless of whether or not one of them has a big hit out. It’s become virtually impossible for either one of them to become irrelevant … they would both have to become irrelevant.
From a business perspective, they don’t do endorsements together. But if one of them does an endorsement, there’s kind of this implicit sign-off from the other one. You know that Jay-Z is not going to endorse Budweiser or Hublot if Beyonce doesn’t like it or disapproves of it. You don’t really get two for the price of one, but you definitely get more than one.
And what about the baby?
I think he sees the business in everything, and when it comes to Blue Ivy he can’t not see some business potential there. They tried to trademark the name and I don’t think they were able to do all they wanted to … but they haven’t really tried to exploit it. If you ever notice when they’re out in public he covers her face so that there are no unauthorized pictures. The only ones I’ve seen have been the ones they released. That totally fits with his M.O. of, “I’m not letting somebody else profit off of something that I could be profiting off.â€
Some people I talked to say they actually named her Blue Ivy because it was the kind of name that you could trademark. If her name were, like, Mary Carter, you couldn’t trademark that. But who knows what the motivation was? My guess is he felt it would be wise to leave the door open to profit off his child’s name … and it could be that he wanted her to be able to profit off her own name. Imagine in twenty years, Blue Ivy is going to the Tisch School and designing her own clothing line. That’s kind of a cool name for a clothing line.
I hope we can talk a little bit about your Michael Jackson book.
Sure.
Did you go to Simon and Schuster or did they go to you?
I pitched the book. If you told me three years ago my next book would be about Michael Jackson I wouldn’t believe you because I thought that everything that had been written was
it. But in the past few years covering the business of his estate and immersing myself more in that and his life, I realized that there was a story here that nobody had written. And we all know that he was successful, but what a lot of people don’t realize was that it was his own business savvy that in many ways drove much of his success. That’s what gradually dawned on me organically. I thought, here was a counter-intuitive hypothesis on the most famous person since Jesus Christ, and I have to tell this story. I had amassed a pretty good collection of sources already telling me things that were really resourceful, and so I had enough to get started.What are you finding most interesting about Michael over the course of your research?
Aww, man. Where to begin? [Laughs.] Interestingly, one of the main traits that made him successful as a businessman is one that made Jay-Z successful, and that’s their thirst for knowledge. Everybody I talk to tells me that he was a voracious reader. He studied the greats in music, art and history, and read biographies on everyone from Thomas Edison to Elvis. He wanted to study the greats of every profession and take ideas and make them into his own; and fit into his way of operating. I think maybe a lot of people heard of his acquisition of the ATV catalogue in 1985. But all of the different deals he pursued and how he was able to succeed in doing some things … I don’t want to give it away; but let’s just say that there are a lot of things over the past 10-15 years, guys like Jay-Z and Diddy have been lauded for, that Michael was into in the eighties. He was so far ahead of his time, and it’s been cool to dig into some of those deals and talk to the people who worked with him on it.
It seemed like he just came of age in the perfect environment at exactly the right time.
Well just as Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga are the first true superstars born of the social media age, you could say that Michael was the first of the 24-hour news cycle and MTV era. It wasn’t easy, because MTV only wanted to play stuff by white people until Michael Jackson came along and basically forced them to play his stuff. Not only did he have a role in developing MTV as a medium but he’d opened it to all genres and races. Before it was just rock. He wouldn’t call them videos — he would call them short films. In the process, he really revolutionized the music video as an art form.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.