"How come there's no more Roc-A-Fella?" — Dame Dash reveals Mariah Carey was removed from Beanie Sigel’s “Feel It In The Air”

On Monday, July 28, @ArtofDialgoue_ shared a snippet from a new Dame Dash interview on X, where the former Roc-A-Fella co-founder spoke about Feel It in the Air. According to Dash, the 2005 song by Beanie Sigel was initially supposed to feature Mariah Carey.

Opening up about how Carey was swapped for another singer last-minute, Dame Dash said:

"I had Mariah Carey laying the vocals of 'Feel It In The Air' for Beanie, and he swapped out the singer for a younger singer that was on our label... I would've rather had Mariah Carey on the record. I gotta find that vocal. You know, Beanie started making decisions that I just would be like, ahead, so every decision Beanie made was his."

For the unversed, MJ Songstress ultimately featured on the Sigel track, which was released on March 29, 2005.

Further in the video, Dash also spoke about the reason behind Roc-A-Fella Records' dissolution still being a mystery to him, adding:

"To me, everybody in the Roc-A-Fella should've been a billionaire. And the question I always ask is how come there's no more Roc-A-Fella? I left it on somebody's watch... What you should talk about is, what did Roc-A-Fella look like when I had it, and then when I didn't. How cool was it before, and then it just evaporated."

Founded by Jay-Z, Damon Dash, and Kareem Burke in 1994, the record label was dissolved in 2013. According to a Yahoo! Finance article (published on November 16), Dash's one-third share of the record label was sold in an auction last year, to settle the record executive's tax debt of $8.7 million.

On November 14, 2024, an anonymous representative from Albany won the bid on the share for $1 million.

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Memphis Bleek spoke about why Jay-Z drifted apart from the Roc-A-Fella group

Dame Dash brought up Roc-A-Fella Records more than a month after Memphis Bleek spoke about Jay-Z, and how he drifted apart from the record label.

According to the former label artist, Carter seemed to have no other choice at that point. Bleek said in his interview with The Breakfast Club (published on June 16):

"For Jay to be where he at, he couldn’t be around us everyday. I’m a liability. Me now being married, being a businessman, of course, things have changed. But the reckless Bleek? You couldn’t be around us. Anything could happen, and then it spills right back to you."

Memphis Bleek was one of the major artists signed to the record label, alongside Kanye West, The Diplomats, Jadakiss, DJ Clue, Beanie Sigel, Cam'ron, and State Property.

Bleek was also asked about how he had perceived the upcoming dissolution of the record label before other labelmates could. While the rapper didn't have an answer to it, he did claim to have warned the others about it, saying:

"That’s the thing, if you really sit down — see, a lot of people, when these cameras cut on, they got an image, they gotta keep it up. But if they really sit down and have a real conversation with the reality pills on the table, they’ll tell you that I told these guys this was coming."

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Five years before Roc-A-Fella Records was dissolved, Jay-Z founded Roc Nation in 2008.

Edited by Akanksha Mishra