Dame Dash didn't wash cars or toss newspapers or shuck corn to make money as a kid.
He sold crack.
In a recent interview with VladTV, the hip-hop oriented entrepreneur stated that his first-ever job was dealing drugs.
"I don't advocate it," Dash said. "But it is what it is. It was crack."
Best known for his Roc-A-Fella relationship with Jay Z and his romance with Aaliyah, Dash spoke about his life before the fame, when he was making loads of cash on the streets while also playing the role of enforcer.
"Having more money than older people, it made me kind of arrogant 'cause they didn't have anything that I felt I didn't have," Dash said. "I just felt I was living in this square life. I definitely think it gave me a certain mentality. Also, the concept of taking your money and reinvesting it and also having to pay people to sell it. And understanding that you always have to have a team and that you lead by example. But the difference with crack is [that] there's violence involved.
"If somebody doesn't pay you, even at that level, you gotta put your hands on them or else you can't really do that game anymore. Everyone's always watching. So, there's also different stakes and there's different repercussions of disrespect. The only reason why is because the survival aspect of it, not for the glorification of it. In order to survive at that street level, it involved being violent at times. You know what I mean?"
So what made him move away from that life? Apparently the 2002 movie Paid In Full.
"That scared me, that experience, because I saw it," Dash said. "I saw a kid die that had nothing to do with what was going on. It made me think that the game was disgusting and unfair and I didn't want any parts of it but I didn't want to have a nine-to-five job so I was trying to figure out how to live like a hustler but without really doing anything illegal. I had went to a party with my cousin and it was an industry party. Everyone was really pretending to be hustlers but none of them really were hustling. I was like, 'Oh, I could do this all day.'"
Dash was recently in the news for bashing Kanye West over West's supposed lack of support for Roc-A-Fella co-founder Kareem "Biggs" Burke, who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and conspiracy charges.
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