I see you’ve been getting a lot of love across the country with your new album. Crazy! It’s a hundred times more than last time. I would say we’re elevating and we’re on a good roll. What’s your ultimate goal in terms of where you want to be? Are you going in a lot of different directions, or just focusing on the music right now? I want to just keep my entrepreneur game on top, make sure I’m focused on music, the acting, the new reality show, and make sure I’m able to put my team and artists on. What’s the reality show about? Is it just cameras following you around in your everyday life or is there a theme to it, like a Flavor Flav-style competition? I can’t really talk about the theme of the TV show until I ink the deal, but shout out to MTV and VH1. It’s a crazy concept. It’s some baller shit. It’s just heavy money and major controversy. With the music industry being in a slump like it is now, do you think artists are forced to go different routes to get money outside of just selling records? It’s still money in selling records. I’m making money but I’m independent. That’s why I’m seeing the money I’m seeing. I would say for artists that’s on major labels, yeah, you’ve gotta make sure you have a few different hustles on the side to keep your bank account increasing. You have a joint venture deal with Shaq’s label, right? Yeah, I’m signed to my label Knock Out. I partnered up with Shaq. His company is called Deja 34 and we got a distribution deal through Koch. Do you think being with an independent is a better situation for you than being with a major label where you’ll get a lot of promotion but not as much money? Yeah, since I was able to come out with “One Wish” and give myself that much exposure and that much hype, I felt like I could do it again. I just needed a hungrier independent company and somebody that was already in the game as opposed to a new distribution company that’s never done it before. That’s what I was dealing with last time and we still broke the ice. This time around with Koch, we topped the charts heavy. We sold a million ringtones [of “Sexy Can I”] and two million digital singles already. We’re climbing. You and Berg seem inseparable now. How did y’all link up? That’s the homie. We hung out first. We met each other through a mutual friend. We just got real cool and became friends, then we started doing records. He a good dude. We had a good time this year. We had a good run. The album is in stores, right? Yeah, the album is out – All I Feel. You’ve been getting a lot of features, right, like the new Boss Hogg record? Yeah, shout out to Boss Hogg, Slim Thug. I did a feature with them, Bubba Sparxx, DJ Khaled, and that 2 Pistols record too. You’ve pretty popular on the blogs lately. Lots of Ray J rumors. They said you got kicked out of a hotel in D.C. because they found you with drugs. That shit at the Hyatt hotel was some bullshit. They thought they could ruin my career by putting out all that false shit in the papers. If we were caught with drugs in D.C., the D.C. police would not have let us walk out [of the hotel]. We would’ve gotten arrested and taken to jail and then we would’ve had to deal with the problem. We left the hotel. We were loud. We asked them to give us a warning; they said, “No. Get out.” So I got loud and started trippin’. Fifty police came and escorted us out. That was it. The next day they [claimed] we had drugs and all that. They only did that ‘cause they didn’t know what actions I was gonna take against the hotel and what kind of press I was gonna put on the hotel, so they tried to respond quickly with some false bullshit. It is what it is. It’s the business. We just gotta learn how to deal with it and move forward and stay positive. What’s up with you and Whitney Houston? That’s the homie. That’s my peoples. We just went to that fight. I sang the National Anthem at the Bernard Hopkins fight. She came through and supported, gave me some tips on how to do the National Anthem. It was all love. That’s all it is. It ain’t nothing but love. As far as us being together, it’s impossible ‘cause I’m working, she’s working, and we don’t have time to connect like that. The work is overshadowing everything. You seem like an odd couple just because of the age difference. It’s a gang of 43, 45, 47 year old sexy women out there, and a gang of 30 years and older women. Believe that. I love ‘em. Even though I’m still in my 20s, I can see beauty from 50 miles away. It’s Ray J, a.k.a King Pimp! You have to get paid to be a pimp technically, right? Do you get paid? Nah, you just gotta be on top of your game with a personal interest in meeting people. What’s going on in your love life right now? Money. Every day we wake up, it’s just more money to get. This independent run is intense, it’s fun. If you really wanna stack chips you gotta get up early and pretty much don’t go to sleep – catch those flights, do those features, find those checks, make sure your publish-
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