S. Samuel
Rap mogul Jay-Z took some time to silence his critics over the weekend during the third night of his Barclays Center concert series in Brooklyn, New York.
Footage from last night’s performance shows Young Hov taking his haters head-on.
During his third night of concerts at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Jay-Z took the time to speak to the crowd and address some recent criticism. In particular, he noted how newspapers have pointed out his minority ownership of the Brooklyn Nets. “Don’t let anybody diminish your accomplishments,” he said to the crowd. “It’s our motherf*cking time now.” He then told “every single person” to throw up their middle fingers and direct them at everyone who tried to hold them back before tearing through “99 Problems.” (Complex)
In August, New York Times reporter David Halbfinger discussed Jay’s resistance to get featured in a Brooklyn Nets write-up.
“The first couple of calls I made was to try and see if Jay-Z would talk to us because that would take the story in a very friendly direction presumably. There are issues with doing that. The issue if you get an interview is how much do you allow the interview to shape the direction of your reporting? In this case his people said, “No way, no how!” In fact, they tried to shut the story down arguing that this is just a hype story and why don’t we wait until later when the arena is open. … It was very straightforward and exactly how the story turned out to be. … I also reminded them that I wrote the “American Gangster” piece. It’s very simple. He invested $1 million and that was out of a $300 million purchase price. That’s one-third of one percent, period. End of story.” (The Launch Magazine)
He also opened up on the controversy behind Jay only owning one-fifteenth of one percent of the Nets.
“When Mikhail D. Prokhorov (the billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets) bought 80 percent of the team what that does is squeezes down the 100 percent of all the other people into 20 percent. Everybody who had a piece up to that point had their stake divided by five. That’s it. Clearly what Jay’s stake is worth now, you could calculate it if you knew what the team was valued at based on Prokhorov’s purchase and then you could guess how much it’s gone up or down since then. But it’s just simple math. … ” (The Launch Magazine)
The original New York Times feature exposed just how much actual control and ownership Jay has of the Brooklyn team.
Yesterday, The New York Times published an article highlighting all the things that Jay-Z has done to build the Brooklyn Nets brand after purchasing a minority stake in the franchise. Since Hov put down $1 million for the team nine years ago, the Nets have gone through a lot of downs, very few ups and a great amount of change. Still, Jay and his one-fifteenth of one percent ownership of the team (yeah, you read that correctly), have played an important role in nearly every facet of the Nets evolution from New Jersey to Brooklyn. (Complex)
Check out Jay-Z speaking to critics below:
