Dame Dash still won’t let his long-shelved Roc-A-Fella documentary happen unless Jay-Z finally gets a say in it too.
Written by Dj Rage on September 2, 2020
Dame Dash sat on hundreds of hours of rare Roc-A-Fella footage for years, and a filmmaker just revealed why nobody’s ever seen it. Director Adam Bhala Lough said Dash asked him to direct the official documentary, and he was ready, but one condition got in the way
Lough shared the story in a post responding to writer Andre Gee’s newsletter about Dash’s ongoing shots at Jay-Z.
“Dame asked me to direct the official Rocafella documentary. He’s sitting on 100s of hours of incredible footage from that era,” Lough wrote. “I said I’d only do it if I got Jay-Z’s side of the story too. Dame refused.”
Dash co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records with Jay-Z and Kareem “Biggs” Burke back in 1994, and Reasonable Doubt became the label’s breakout classic two years later. Def Jam bought the label’s remaining half in 2004, ending its run as an independent company
Jay-Z became president of Def Jam soon after, and that promotion effectively pushed Dash out of the empire he’d helped build.
The fallout produced years of lawsuits, starting with Dash’s failed 2021 attempt to auction a stake in Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt as an NFT. A judge later ordered U.S. Marshals to seize Dash’s Roc-A-Fella shares and sell them to satisfy an $823,000 judgment against him.
With money, pride, and years of public shots between them, reconciliation looks further away than ever.
Those unanswered shots finally caught up with Dash in May, when Jay-Z clapped back with a Roots Picnic freestyle.
Jay-Z rapped about teeth “tumbling” out of somebody’s mouth in a direct nod to Dash’s viral video when his teeth popped out of his mouth on a livestream. Dash clapped back on The Art of Dialogue, calling the freestyle “bad” and “terrible” and daring Jay-Z to drop a real diss record.
