• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Interview: Love Hurts

-- by Shaheem Reid

Ja Rule is hanging out at the Crack House - not the kind of place you'd expect to find a platinum-laced rapper.

It's not what you might think, though. This Crack House is in lower Manhattan, and it serves as the house studio for Murder Inc. Records, Ja Rule's label. It's called the Crack House because it's the place where they cook up addictive hits, and it looks nothing like its more nefarious narco-world namesake.

Ja Rule is sitting in the corner of a small room on a swivel chair, holding a fistful of $100 bills. As a few of his fellow Murderers busy themselves with a no-holds-barred basketball video game, Ja Rule acts the part of the franchise player. He peels off a stack of bills as if they were George Washingtons, not Ben Franklins, and sends one of the studio's employees on a food and Cristal run.

Dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt, matching untied 'do rag and Nike headband, his neck weighed down by a gold chain and diamond-flooded Jesus piece, Ja Rule is affirming that this is definitely his world. He's poring over the Broadcast Data Systems report, which tallies how many spins a record is getting at radio.

"See the stars next to my name? I'm doing quite well," he playfully boasts. Since March, his hit "Put It on Me" has broken the BDS record for spins of a rap record. His remix duet with Jennifer Lopez, "I'm Real," currently holds the R&B mainstream record.

Sitting below a mural that reads "The Most Dangerous Record Label, Murder Inc. Records" in bold red letters is Milwaukee Buck, the Crack House's main engineer. He's hearing an earful from Ja Rule as he tries to punch up a track for the rapper to listen to.

"I see a pain could turn to trust/ Within a lost lit-til girl," roars Ja's recorded voice from one of the speakers. "She can get a man to do anything/ But she's a lost lit-til girl."

Ja wants to tell the story behind the song, but he has to shout to be heard over the video game bleeps and punchy synthesizers arranged by his label's CEO and the track's producer, Irv Gotti.

"This beat was supposed to be for Brandy," the 25-year-old says with a sly smile before disclosing the obvious - that he kept it for himself. The song, "Lost Little Girl," is a last-minute addition to his new album, Pain Is Love.
Instead of sprinkles of the braided R&B star's spry harmonies, the beat is now saturated with Ja's cries of angst and fervently spilled storytelling about a fast-living girl who's destined for misery. It's a testament to Ja's newly minted status as a hit-writer-for-hire that he can take a song intended for a mainstream singer and turn it into a thug anthem that is undeniably his.

Unlike rappers who carry around notebooks filled with rhymes and ideas, Ja Rule flows from somewhere more spontaneous. Most of the hooks to his biggest hits sprung out of him spontaneously, jumping up from his throat as if delivered by a force he can't control.

"It's how I came up with 'Between Me and You,'" he says of one of his biggest hits. "I came up with the hook in seconds, because sometimes when I listen to tracks I can hear the words. I feel like I can hear the words coming out of the tracks sometimes."

Just three albums in, he's also mastered the art of slipping easily between hardcore and sensitive gangsta. As if to prove it, he plays a posse cut called "The Inc.," on which he rhymes about getting his thug on.
"These types of records are easy, street records," says Ja. The Hollis, Queens, native was born and bred on rapping in the mean streets. Before he got a record deal, Ja Rule used to feed on fellow street-corner MCs in rhyme battles alongside another then-rookie, DMX. But unlike Dark Man, Ja Rule hasn't found his greatest success by keeping one foot in the gutter. It's his universally loved hip-hop/R&B hybrids that have allowed him to shine the brightest.
"Sometimes I'll be thinking about it and I'll be like, 'Man, I don't want muthaf---ers to think that I can't spit,' " he says. "I don't want them to forget who I am. That's what I used to do; I used to battle. A lot of MCs that are out right now, we used to give it to them. [We would] come to their video shoots [and] just go at it hard."

But crooners, pop princesses and headbangers are the ones who Ja Rule has been going at it hard with lately. He says he wrote a song for Brandy's album that she's ecstatic about, and acts such as TLC, Metallica, Macy Gray and Enrique Iglesias have been hitting him on his two-way, hoping he can do the same for them as he did for J. Lo. No Doubt's been calling too, and J. Lo wouldn't mind another track while he's at it.
Not bad for someone whom some wrote off as a one-hit wonder and Tupac wannabe based on his first album, 1999's Venni Vetti Vecci.

"I'm established now, and people respect what I do as an artist now versus just [making] a hot record," Ja Rule says. "Now I'm coming with Pain Is Love. [It shows the] transition I've been through. I've gone through all the pain and the suffering, and I'm receiving some love on this one."

"He's found his zone," Def Jam President Kevin Liles says. "Now he's got n----s saying, 'That's a Ja Rule record.' I'm not surprised. He's worked tremendously to make sure he defines himself as being more than just a guy who raps. He is becoming his own business, and people want to be in the Ja Rule business."

"That's the main thing I want people to grasp from me," says Ja, co-star of such films as last summer's "The Fast and the Furious" and the upcoming "Crime Partners." "I want them to look at me and say, 'Yo, he is a rapper and he comes from the rap world, but he can do so many other things. I think it's in us to do these things, but a lot of artists are scared to explore their musical talents.

"I don't think all of them grasp the real true essence of music," he continues. "It's really something spiritual. It's universal. It's driven by passion and feeling. I wanna do some things with this album. I wanna break some barriers."
As those barriers come down, Ja's not finding that it's more money, more problems. Just the opposite, in fact. The more success he has and the more respect he gains, the easier it is to do his thing.

"I didn't feel like I even made my album," Ja Rule says. "I was done before I knew it."

Unlike his previous LP, last year's Rule 3:36, recorded as he chilled in Beverly Hills for months with his Murder Inc. brethren, this time Ja Rule was hard at work while touring, trying to put together his second album in just under a year.
With sessions in studios from Los Angeles to Miami, in his home and at the Crack House, he was so focused on laying down songs he can't even tell you how long it took to make the album.

"It happened so fast," he says. His eyes widen, as they usually do when he gets excited, and that million-selling grin creeps across his face. "I was arguing with Gotti, playing with him like, 'Man, I [didn't] get to sit down and do my sh-- the way I really wanted.' He was saying, 'This is your best album.' I'm listening to the songs and I'm like, 'You're right.' I just wanted to sit down and feel like I'm absorbing it all. [Now] I'm just trying soak up the album."
As he plays cut after cut from the record, bouncing around the studio, drinking, smoking, it's as if Ja Rule is finally getting to live in the moment of each track. Listening to his music, he doesn't just press play, he performs the tracks as if he's in front of an audience of thousands, not a half-dozen. One minute he's doing a little woodpeckerlike head nod as a beat comes in. The next he loses himself in the song and starts to dance around, using his hands and facial expressions to act out lines that touch him. Then, through the power of a line from his next single, "Always on Time," he's beamed out of the grimy studio into a sports arena.

"And I love to see that ass in boots and shades," he rhymes along with himself.

"Thug style, you never thought I'd make you smile," he carries on, his eyes closed, removing his 'do rag and leaving just a headband around his head.

"Gotti [didn't] even like this beat," Ja Rule says of his friend, who produced the track. He breaks out into an I-told-you-so ear-to-ear grin. "I had it at my crib, and I was like, 'Yo, that beat is crazy.' " Ja Rule knew he was onto something, but Gotti wasn't hearing it. Needless to say, Ja Rule won that scuffle and Gotti finally saw the light.

As that song fades, the melodic acoustic guitars of "Down Ass Bitch," which features Charli Baltimore, comes on.

"Every thug needs a la-daaaaay," he sings along with the song, flailing his arms.

"I see this one at shows. When I come out, [there's] 30,000 people. I can see it," he says. "It's visual."

"Baby, say yeeeeaaaah," he keeps singing in sync with the song's intro, eyes shut tight, holding an imaginary mic to his mouth. "Baby, say yeeeeaaaah," he repeats, this time with the imaginary mic pointed to the sky, as if to exhort the invisible crowd to back him up.

"This is talking strictly to the women, 'cause you know how it is when you're in the 'hood, you got your chick," he explains as he and Baltimore - a new Murder Inc. member - pledge allegiance to each other on the track playing in the background. "The one that's with you when you're out of town doing your thing. She's with you for the long ride. She's probably going to catch a bullet for you 'cause she's always with you. This here, this is a hustler's woman."
Ja Rule says he caught some drama from his real-life soul mate, wife Aisha, because of the frank relationship scenarios depicted in some of his hit records.

"It's all reality music to me," he says. "It's what we all go through, certain sh-- n----s are afraid to say. 'Between Me and You' - you know how much heat I got from my wife?

"'What do you mean 'between me and you?,' " he says, rolling his eyes and raising the pitch of his voice to mimic Aisha's. "[Other rappers] ain't making that record. They think it every day, but they ain't gonna make it. But I'm gonna put the reality out there."

But for tonight, Ja Rule is going to stay in his own world, at least until Pain Is Love finishes playing on the studio's sound system.

Rhyming along to "Never Again," the scowl on his face is intense as he tells of making sure his life's mistakes don't repeat themselves. "In this world I'm alone and trapped inside this body that's ... out of control/ I'm hitting these streets daily, knowing I got babies to feed and rarely seeing them, really/ This game inhaled me."