Video After The Jump
Saigon is one of those rappers everybody knows is nice. What a lot of people can’t figure out is why he’s never blown, especially with the backing of producers like Just Blaze and Statik Selektah.
No doubt his stint on the HBO show Entourage has been a good look for The Yardfather, but what hip hop fans really want is ‘The Greatest Story Never Told’ album.
Sai chopped it up with Urban Daily to talk about his acting career, Jay-Z jacking his beats and why he left Atlantic Records.
UD: How Bad Were The Groupies On The Set Of Entourage?
Sai: There’s a million Entourage stories man. There’s girls that would camp out around the trailer. ‘I just wanna meet Vince’, they really call him Vince - they don’t call him Adrien [Grenier]. One woman wanted to meet Turtle. I was a little closer to turtle. So I told her, I guess we could find a way for you to meet Turtle. All you gotta do is come hang out for a little while, tell some jokes, make us laugh and you know, we’ll bring Jerry [Ferrara] in here, or Turtle.
UD: How Many Beats Did Jay-Z Steal From You?
Sai: Jay-Z was jacking for beats baby. When we were working in Baseline [Studios] we were all like a close family. And Jay would come around, pop up every now and then. You know me and Just [Blaze] was in there working hard and Just would give me a gang of beats at a time. And every now and then one of them would come up missing. One that I was probably writing to or something that I really loved. Then the next thing you know, they would have this big meeting. And they would go, ‘yo Sai we need to talk to you. You know that beat we had, the one you was loving? Big homie got that now.’ You know big homie was Jay-Z, he did that to me about three or four times.
UD: What Beats Did He Take?
Sai: Kingdom Come is mine, actually two didn’t make his album. And Come On Baby - he took it, did his thing to it then gave it back because he didn’t want to use it, so he gave it back to me. But he was like ‘you can keep the verse that I laid on it.’ That was a big homie move because you can’t buy a Jay-Z beat. You can’t go to Jay-Z and say hey we got $100,000 for you to get on a record. He wipes his ass with $100,000 dollars. That’s why he said in that line “you wanna be in the public send your budget”. That means your whole recording budget. There’s no more money for producers, studio time, nothing.
UD: When Did You Finally Get Off Atlantic Records?
Sai: I got off Atlantic Records March 10, 2010. All these years I’ve just been sitting around. I was still on Atlantic Records this whole time technically. They wasn’t putting my music out but I was still contractually bound to them until March 10 of this year.
Sai’s long awaited album ‘The Greatest Story Never Told’ drops in 2011.
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