A couple of summers ago I visited some friends of mine over at Murder Inc's old studio "Crack House" in NY. I never got to meet Ja then, but I always thought that sitting down and asking him some questions would be dope. I'd really just want to see what he's working on, ask him about the past, how he's grown as a person and as an artist. I mean he had released 6 albums since 1999...His third album "Pain is Love" went # 1 on Billboard and 3 times platinum in the U.S. alone. "New York" still plays in the clubs and songs like "I'm real", "Livin' it up", and "Always on Time" defined my musical taste in high school.
His beef with 50, was one of the most talked about beefs in the history of rap beefs, and his last commercial album was in 2004...6 years ago.
There's so many questions I had to ask him from music, to personal, to business.

After he released "uh-ohhh" with Wayne off "The Mirror" my homie Rick said he'd be able to set up something with Ja and HipHopCanada [where I was writing director at the time] and so I prepared this really long interview with like 30 questions to ask him. It never actually went down.

Last night, Rick and Buck [@BUCK3STACKS on twitter] randomly called me from the studio to chit chat and play me some records. They told me Ja was in the studio too. Rick was like "Hey, you want that drop for your website from Ja now?" and I thought....well why don't I just do an #ichatsession with Ja since it would be over ichat anyway. Ja said "Let's do it" so Buck set it up on his computer.

Unfortunately for me, all those questions I wanted to ask him including something along the lines of "Where have you been? What have you been doing? Where you at?" litterally went out the window. It was 3 am and I had had a very long day...but this was gonna go down regardless. So here's what came out of it. I think it's a pretty dope conversation either way. His volume is kind of rough too, but it is what it is.

If you don't have a chance to sit back and see the clip, here's a brief blurb on what Ja says. Basically he is no longer on The Inc, but rather on his own label Mpire where he has 2 other artist signed as well: Harry O (who's in the studio next to him) and Merc Montana. He's now working on an album that's due to come out in summer of 2010.

Check it out and for more updates follow Ja Rule on twitter @ruleyork