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After two decades in the business, Jermaine Dupri continues to juggle several music projects at once. While promoting his new reality show, The Rap Game, the hit producer spilled to ABC Radio that he’s submitted songs to Usher‘s upcoming, eighth album, although he’s unsure if his songs will make the cut.
“As a producer, I don’t know. I’ve done records for him, [but] that’s a project I don’t have my total hands on control of, and as a producer you never do, so you never know,” Dupri explains. “Like when ‘We Belong Together’ came out as Mariah [Carey]’s single after ‘It’s Like Dat,’ I was riding in the car and I heard it one the radio and I was like, ‘Wow, I wonder why they playing this song on the radio.'” Then he realized it was indeed a single. He says, “You never know as a producer unless you’re like right next to that person as it’s happening and I haven’t been that person with Usher on this project.”
Dupri adds that he’s still hoping to work with Chris Brown. “I usually don’t want to work with artists that’s established, but I feel like Chris Brown, he’s in between what I have a very good time working with — a young artists as well as a superstar,” Dupri says. “And he has both and he likes to dance and likes to sing and he likes to rap. So he’s in between everything that I like, that’s what attracts me to say that I would love to work with him and get in the studio and really, really work on music.”
The hitmaker says he thinks CB is still holding back from certain subjects in his songs. “Not to take anything away from the music that he already has, I just believe people feel that they haven’t heard something from him,” JD says about the notoriously troubled singer. “He probably doesn’t even want to go back and deal with it because he had so much going on,” but the producer says it would be good to hear a song from Brown that “touched it a little bit, in a way that made people understand that he felt whatever he felt about it.”
The producer thinks Breezy still needs his defining album to solidify his stardom. “I feel like he’s yet to make his Control album or his My Way album. Like, these are records that define each superstar like that, like I said Janet [Jackson], Usher, like Snoop Dogg‘s first album I think was his defining moment,” JD says before explaining how tricky it is to record a timeless project. “I mean some artists are lucky to have it in their first album, like Snoop, but then like Usher, it was his second album. So I mean, Chris Brown is not in a space where it’s too late, but he has to do it. He has to make an album that people talk about him and that album together.”
In the meantime, you can catch JD on The Rap Game airing on Lifetime Fridays at 10 p.m.
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