Illustration by Rob Dobi
Damon Dash is sitting in the loft space that he calls his own on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is named Poppington, and bills itself as an art gallery of sorts, although there is not much art on display. Well, except for maybe Dash himself, whose mere act of existence has at times appeared to be some grand exercise in an elaborate piece of performance art. Damon Dash is 44-years-old and if you spend enough time around him, listen to his interviews, pay close attention to his candid social media presence, you can see that he is playing a character he is presenting to the world. Damon Dash is playing himself—Damon Dash starring in The Life of Damon Dash.
It's a blustery afternoon in late March, just a few short days after the former Roc-A-Fella Records executive appeared on radio station Power 105’s morning show The Breakfast Club, and let loose on its hosts in a way that was loud, combative, opinionated, and funny. It was the Damon Dash of old, the one we have spent the better part of 20 years getting to know. The one who once lost his shyt at a Def Jam meeting. The one who willingly shyts on feared music execs like Kevin Liles andLyor Cohen. The one with "Culture Vulture" issues with Complex Media and DJ Vlad and Funkmaster Flex and anyone else who just doesn’t see the world the way Dame Dash sees it. The one who just doesn’t give a fukk.
Today, I am not meeting that Damon Dash, until I am.
Questions about Kanye West and manhood and family find him expressively-candid, thoughtful, poignant, and emotive. He smokes a lot of weed—probably far too much weed—but when he is excited, his eyes, which belie some deeply guarded sadness, widen. He is jovial. He is humorous. He talks about the streets. He talks about the entertainment business. He talks about growing up. He talks about black people. He talks about white people. He talks about women. He talks about men. He talks about success. He talks about failure. He is charismatic. He has completely bat-shyt views, views that people have but would never admit they have views. Some make sense. Some don’t. Whatever. He speaks with conviction. He speaks with confidence. Damon Dash is a born leader. I’m buying in. I’m on Team Dusko Poppington. And then I’m not.
Continued below.
Dame Dash has strong views on family, entrepreneurship and old-school manliness—the kind of things talking heads on Fox News and right wing radio like to discuss—but when I ask him whether he realizes those things are part and parcel of the Republican and Conservative parties, his eyes narrow and his brow furrows. The veins on his neck bulge. He’s offended, angry, and doesn’t see the connection between him and Republicans. He’s a Democrat. “I don’t think I’m saying anything Obama doesn’t say.” He says he believes in paying taxes, even though he owes the I.R.S. back tax money, and says Republicans own oil companies, even though he has an oil company himself—Damon Dash Motor Oil. He says I’m racist because I favorably compare his enterprising stewardship of the black-owned record label Roc-A-Fella Records to Suge Knight and halcyon days of Death Row Records. “You compare me to a nikka that’s in jail,” he says. “That’s racist. Compare me to someone who is white.”
I get it. Sort of. If I were him, I’d be offended too. Or, maybe not. Damon Dash is confusing. I am trying to figure him out. Damon Dash the character is pissed, because Damon Dash the man is hurt. We laugh it off. The tension persists. It’s awkward. He makes thinly veiled threats; I don’t flinch. I’m not Kevin Liles. I’m not Lyor Cohen. I’m not DJ Vlad. I am a man. I will beat the shyt out of Damon Dash. Or more likely, Damon Dash will beat the shyt out of me. fukk it. It happens. Damon Dash just wants his respect. Listen to him rant; listen to him rant!
“I haven’t been in music in 15 years. I do fashion. Compare me to Andrew Rosen, who bought Theory and Rag & Bone. I don’t want to just be compared to Suge Knight. I don’t want to be in the same sentence. I don’t have a label. I have a division of music. I acquire companies. I’m not in the music business. I don’t do what they do. I buy companies. I sell companies. I create companies. I liquidate companies. I license out companies. I do a lot. I design, from the beginning, to the rooter to the tooter. I get a design, I go get the pattern, I go source the fabric, I go do the fittings. I was fukking educated in Savile Row. I learned how to make a suit in London.”
Did you hear that? Damon Dash learned how to make a suit in London.
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All quasi-confrontational bullshyt aside, Dame Dash is a motherfukking legend. His early Roc-A-Fella Records moves alone place him somewhere next to Diddy, Russell Simmons, and Bryan “Birdman” Williams on hip-hop executive Mt. Rushmore. He introduced the world to Jay Z, and he built a label that included people like Beanie Sigel, Cam'ron, and Kanye West on its roster. For that, he always be a giant and always be revered.
But these days, he’s more immersed in projects like his art gallery, his fashion line, and his movie. But it’s what he says more than what he does that gets people going:
“If a man doesn’t want to be a boss, then he’s not a real man.”
“I’m not going to fight for something I don’t own.”
“How could a man say he has a boss and be proud?”
“Jobs are for lazy people who don’t want to invest in themselves.”
“Do you have to come to work today? Do you have a choice? Can another man say you’re fired? No one can tell me that.”
These are some of the things he yelled at Breakfast Club host DJ Envy on the radio. In a day and age when most people aspire to one day tell their middling bosses to go fukk themselves—assuming, of course, they even have jobs in the first place—the Dame Dash school of life doesn’t sound that strange. In fact, it’s enviable. Americans are overworked, underpaid, and frustrated. We think this stuff; we just don’t say it. But there’s something about Dame’s empowerment program—something hard to place, hard to define. It’s a little unsettling.
“I’m not a Republican,” he says, whipping a lit blunt from his lips. “[But] the more entrepreneurs there are, the better it is for the economy. I’m just not with paying people who don’t want to work. It’s a complacency thing. Instead of giving people money, let’s give them an opportunity.”
Dame Dash isn’t like his cousin, the actress Stacey Dash, who supported Mitt Romney in the last election and recently told women to “stop making excuses” about the gender wage gap, but at times he really can sound like a conservative. It’s not intentional. He’s not even aware of it. He doesn’t have a political agenda. But if you listen to him talk long enough, you’ll see he’s on some Ayn Rand libertarian shyt—living life on his own terms, unvarnished, unimpressed, unburdened by everyday bullshyt—and he doesn’t have a ton of patience for anyone not on his page.
He talks about the streets a lot—the Dame Dash code of ethics comes from the corners he was raised on—but spits out boardroom lingo as if he was born inside one. And in the second half of his career, it can seem like he’s caught between those two worlds, everywhere and nowhere at once. He fancies himself a swashbuckling millionaire. A mogul. A tyc00n. But these days he’s missing the outward-facing success, that one a-ha creation, to back his public bravado. Still, he’s cavalier. Just listen to him talk.
On resilience: “Imagine you get punched in the face, you’re down on the floor, everyone thinks you’re out, but then you get up and you knock a nikka out. I love that fight.”
On gossip: “I think men are wasting their testosterone. Stop being in men’s business. Be like, ‘Yo, I’m a man with a vagina, so I’m not really a man.’
On violence: “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do and treat men as men, then you get violated.”
On therapy: “Therapy is for women.”
In an era of extreme political correctness, when the finger-wagging internet mob can seemingly destroy anyone or anything it deems too “problematic,” Damon Dash, years removed from commanding the record industry empire that allowed him to be the biggest a$$hole imaginable, endures. His nonsensical platitudes resonate. He is a lion in winter, a real life character from a Martin Scorsese movie, the black Wolf of Wall Street. But life is not a movie and the ballad of Damon Dash isn’t opening in theaters nationwide this summer. He’s just a guy who has won a lot, lost a lot, and now finds himself caught somewhere in the middle.
“I’m human,” he says. “And if you turn your back, business is like boxing. You get in the ring, anything goes.”
Damon Dash has been beaten before. A $2.8 million unpaid tax bill has been hanging over his head for years and his most recent knockdown comes at the manicured hands of his ex-wife, designer Rachel Roy. In late April, she won custody of their two children and filed a restraining order. A few weeks ago, the police put out a pair of arrest warrants for him, claiming he owes hundreds of thousands in unpaid child support. As Dame Dash often does, he took to social media to lash out at the lawyers and at his ex-wife. In April, he slapped Roy with his own $2.5 million lawsuit. He got “fukked” on the fashion company they started together in 2005 and wants what he is due.
“I got robbed in that moment for everything,” he says, suggesting that in 2009, back when his money problems really began, he’d invested far too much money into the company for the amount of debt it was carrying. “But it’s just business. It’s all part of the game. They won the battle, I’m winning the war.”
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Dame is a hard guy to get a read on. His moods change moment to moment. One minute he is charming (“The more the love, the better”), the next he’s threatening (“You disrespect a man and you’re unconscious of it, you don’t know what you’re gonna get— especially when you’re in his house”). He’s a little all over the map. Raised in East Harlem, Dash experienced a different era in New York, before gentrification, when neighborhoods were still neighborhoods, when where you lived really influenced who you would become. He ran the streets, busted guns, and saw death up close at an early age. Harlem was dog eat dog, and it shaped his worldview.
“I was raised around real men,” he says. “I look at the people that were violent and the reasons why— it was only to protect honor. Like, if someone disrespected you, where I’m from, if you don’t disrespect them back immediately, everyone disrespects you.”
Damon Dash would not be disrespected. He was intelligent, cagey, and combative—nobody could take advantage of him. He also attended predominantly white private schools, where he was exposed to a lifestyle he didn’t see living uptown. It changed him. Made him softer. But harder too, in a way. “When you’re going to a white school but you live around black kids you get real insecure,” Dame says. “You feel the need to prove yourself. I was a superhero to the white kids, cause I thought they were weaker than me, no disrespect. That’s reverse racism happening—I’m better in sports, I get all the girls, I’m fresher. But I always thought [about] whether or not I could be this dude in the street.”
In the mid-90s, when he entered the record business as a manager of rap group Original Flavor, he would have his chance. Back then, the rap industry was transitioning out of its please listen to my demo stage and into the DIY independent label model. Tough guys flush with cash from the crack game were angling to get into the business. But you couldn’t just walk into a label asking for a record contract and you couldn’t just post your video to YouTube praying it went viral. You had to get hot in the streets first.
“I’m walking in a room with Jay-Z and you got guys telling me that they’re not going to sign him,” Dame remembers. “Steve Rifkind said he was going to sign him; that didn’t work out. Got him in front of Ruben Rodriguez from Pendulum Records; he was like, ‘rap!’ and we had to walk out like, like ‘get out of here.’ It was just disrespectful. He was the best rapper alive at that point in time, and people were shutting doors.”
It forced Dame to get resourceful. He got with Kareem “Biggs” Burke—a shadowy street guy who allegedly put up the dough to shoot Jay-Z’s “In My Lifetime” video (who is also currently serving a 5-year prison sentence on drug conspiracy charges)—and they started Roc-A-Fella Records.
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