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A Waste Of Time with ItsTheReal

#169: J. Cole's Manager and Dreamville President Ib Hamad

A Waste Of Time with ItsTheReal

ItsTheReal

Music

4.8817 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2018

⏱️ 123 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on A Waste of Time with ItsTheReal, we traveled to Los Angeles for an epic sit down with J. Cole's manager and Dreamville president Ib Hamad! Ib talks about moving to Queens from Paris, the second youngest of five children, with English his third language, finding his voice on the New York City basketball courts. We discuss coaching youth basketball, studying SportsCenter highlights each morning, fleeting thoughts of playing Division 1 college basketball, but ultimately ending up at St. Johns where he'd chase girls and befriend future multi-platinum rapper Jermaine Cole, who at that point barely admitted that he had rhymes. Ib goes through the early days, supporting his friend's musical ambitions at open mics, getting jobs together at call centers, knowing that they had album-ready songs, and eventually capturing the interest of the music industry: meetings with 50 Cent, Shady Records' Paul Rosenberg, and of course, Mark Pitts and Jay-Z. Ib takes us through how the "Dollar and a Dream" campaign started, how Dreamville started, the power of Cole's mixtapes, the many starts and stops Cole's early major label career went through, acting as a push-button DJ for Cole, the differences between the first and second albums, what the HBO series meant, and how exactly 2014 Forest Hills Drive came to be. All that plus stories about JID and Earth Gang, Bas and Cozz, why Interscope was the perfect label partner, who's nicer on the court between Cole and Ib, and much, much more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Jeff. Hey, Eric. How are you? I'm pretty good. How are you? Doing well. Thank you. Back to Los Angeles for

0:04.3

It's the Real. We had to get the people the interview that they wanted. Bill Bellamy. Not that one, not the one that you wanted. Yeah. The interview that the people were demanding, E. Hamad, who is J. Cole's manager and Dreamville president, and it's an awesome one. Now, people are wondering, guys, what are you doing in Los Angeles

0:22.8

all the time? The answer is getting tan. Is getting terrible Airbnbs. Well, I mean, like,

0:29.3

that's sort of our thing, right? Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? I think it's for the story.

0:34.0

It's for sport. Yeah, well, yeah. So we stayed in one where the showerhead was about a foot

0:40.1

and a half too low not great not great we stayed in one where i asked the guy how do i pick up the keys

0:45.6

he said don't worry i'll leave it open not a great answer and then when i did get the keys i put them in the

0:50.9

the the keyhole right keyhole doorknob the door i put them in the doorhole, right? Keyhole, doorknob? The door. I put them in the door. Keyhole, doorhole. I put them in the door hole and the house felt like it was going to fall over. Yeah, not great. Not great. Not advertising the website. And then also we stayed in one that had a Russian nesting doll that started with Osama bin Laden. And then you open that up, and it is Saddam Hussein,

1:12.8

you open that up, and it's Pol Pot, you open that up, it's Mussolini, on and on down to Hitler.

1:17.9

Naturally.

1:18.5

Naturally, natural selectione.

1:21.2

Which brings us to this most recent trip where we go to this place, and by the way, the pictures

1:27.1

looked amazing online. Like, it looked like way too nice to have these two dopes stay in this apartment. And by the way, it should be said that we've had that feeling at every place we've stayed at. Right. We are dopes, and we are easily duped. Yeah. And so we go to this place, and there's probably like 600 apartments and you're walking through and there's a room

1:46.8

that says like the vibe room. Yeah. There's the cool room. Let's just say the clientele that are

1:53.0

around there. It's a swinger's den. It's a swingers den. It's 600 apartments of just pure swinging.

2:01.4

Yeah, just like wife swapping, like, you know.

2:03.9

Key parties.

2:04.8

This is Hollywood's center for STDs.

2:08.7

Like, it is just the grossest apartments.

2:12.1

And so we are like, damn it, like, if only we could get out of this apartment.

2:17.3

And unfortunately, they have a strict policy.

2:19.1

We could not leave.

...

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