Jermaine Dupri
The Catalyst
Ideas with a spark, energy, range and the ability to start things.
Jermaine Dupri is The Catalyst in its purest form, a leader who provokes rather than dictates. He reads the room before he reads the chart, channeling Usher's real emotional turmoil into 'Confessions' and turning a freeway drive past the Beverly Center into a fully formed verse. His test for a hit is involuntary, somebody in the room has to jump. That compulsion to trigger reaction, not to impose vision, is his entire creative philosophy.
“I'm not even gonna argue with it. I might think it's a hit, I'm still not gonna argue with it, because that reaction is what — that's all I got, that's all I know.”
“I'm always mentally going into the studio already thinking like these niggas don't believe we could do it again. We gotta do it, we gotta find it — that's all that mattered to me.”
“I realized, Oh, I'm not — I'm trying to be like them, but I'm actually different. That's the first time it hit me.”
R&B Money: “Jermaine Dupri Part 2”
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