04 December 2014
Newsdesk
You may know him as the co-founder of Interscope Records and the visionary who created Beats (with his partner, Dr. Dre), then sold it to Apple for $3 billion.
But did you know he was a sound engineer on Born to Run? That he produced Patti Smith's Easter, Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes, U2's Rattle and Hum?
That he co-produced the film 8 Mile? That he's a Big Brain in Residence at Apple now? Jimmy Iovine has been a man of many, many years and decades before this one, and his interview with GQ is long overdue
On discovering Eminem “I feel open to anything. Here's an example. In 1998, Death Row was exploding; 'Pac got killed just before; everything was fuckin' upside-down. And my assistant got married, so they put in a temp. And the kid had balls. He said, ‘I went to this rap battle last night. I saw this kid who was incredible.’ I said, ‘Figure out how to get a CD from that kid, and I'll play it for Dre.’ Next day, he comes back: ‘Here it is.’ I listen to it, and I go, ‘I have no idea what the fuck this is.’ This guy is screaming about his mother; he wants to kill his mother. I come from a place where you don't kill your mother. Right? I saw Dre, and I gave it to him. The rest is a fabulous story. His name was Eminem.”
On his relationship with Dr. Dre “We trust each other implicitly. It's the closest to a band as I was ever in. We know what each other does, and we trust each other's instincts so much, that when he's moving somewhere and I go, ‘No,’ he goes, ‘Okay, let's not do that.’ We've been through a lot; this is a guy—I always say, ‘You may know a lot of people who have gotten shot, but you don't know a lot of people who have shot back.’”
