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For his part, Just says that he has no interest in becoming a solo artist. "I could rap," he says. "I could rap right now if I wanted to. I rap probably better than most rappers. . . . But do I want that lifestyle? Do I want that hecticness? No. I got bad asthma. I don't want to be running around onstage for an hour."
Following Just around for an evening, one gets the impression he doesn't have much use for the spotlight, that he'd prefer to spend his time digging through stacks of old records and tinkering with samplers. He certainly doesn't look much like a star: short and doughy, wearing a decade-old Polo windbreaker and sucking on an inhaler every few minutes. At Sound Library, a clerk introduces him to the only other customer in the store, West Coast indie-rap producer Dan "the Automator" Nakamura. Soon, Nakamura tells Just that he's been looking for an SP1200 drum machine. (Just: "I think I know one person who may have one out in Jersey. I could ask him if you want." Nakamura: "Yeah, cool, that's cool. If you ever want to do any bootleg cheap stuff, call me up.") The two then get into a 20-minute discussion about favorite sampling programs. Later, at Baseline Studios, Just will get into a similar conversation with another producer, the frequent Mobb Deep collaborator Alchemist. Just loves this stuff.
He walks out of the Sound Library with hundreds of dollars' worth of old LPs: The Body and Soul of Tom Jones, Lalo Schifrin's soundtrack to Kelly's Heroes, an old Sly and the Family Stone album. "I'll sometimes go into a store and spend two grand," he says, sitting in the back of a car service's black Lincoln Town Car on the way to Baseline Studios. "But if I spent two grand that day and I made one beat that I could sell for 40, 50, 60 grand, you just invested 2,000 and made 50."
The records may be an investment, but it's hard to imagine a producer like Lil Jon or Pharrell Williams dropping big money on the soundtrack of an Italian Charles Bronson movie. Blaze may make hits, but he's also the sort of New York rap classicist who speaks rapturously of taping Mr. Magic's radio show as a child. Born Justin Smith in middle-class Paterson, New Jersey, Blaze was fascinated with music from a young age: "The running family joke is that I DJ'd my first birthday party."
In the years after The Blueprint, the sound of East Coast rap changed completely, absorbing the cascading soul of Blaze and West and moving away from the keyboard-driven club tracks that had previously dominated it. For a while, Blaze was all over the radio. "When I look back, and I had records on the radio back-to-back-to-back, it was because of that Roc-A-Fella movement, which I think fell apart before it should've," he says. Roc-A-Fella split in 2004, when Jay-Z fell out with co-founders Damon Dash and Kareem "Biggs" Burke, who took half the label's roster with them when they left. "To just see it fall apart like that was heartbreaking. When you put all your time into it, I made some money and I got a name out of it, but you don't just do it for the money and the name."
