Jim Jones is looking back at some massive what if moments in his career and he is not ducking the truth. In a candid conversation on The Art of Dialogue the Harlem vet and former exec in artist and repertoire walked through how Drake The Weeknd and J. Cole all crossed his path before superstardom and why he did not lock in deals at the time.
“J. Cole used to be in my studio all the time. I can say that wholeheartedly, and then Drake, Alan Grunblatt let me hear some of his music, but I kept telling him that he had no image. I didn’t understand it, it didn’t connect, but he could rap his a** off,” Jones recalled. The honesty is vintage Capo. Talent was there. Vision just was not lining up for him yet.
Get this, Jones also connected with The Weeknd early under heartbreaking circumstances. He says he flew to Canada to build with the singer on the same day Stack Bundles was killed in Far Rockaway Queens. The loss and the moment shifted everything and any chance to finalize something never materialized.
This is not the first time Jones has admitted he missed on Drake. A 2022 clip made the rounds where he remembered being pitched on the future superstar back in the era when the Toronto kid was still known from television. “I got this guy named Drake, he’s an actor, he’s on Degrassi.’” Jones remembered being confused and unimpressed at first and said his gut reaction was blunt: “Who the f**k is Drake on Degrassi?”
He kept it going sharing how the image gap threw him. “Then I looked at him, I’m like, ‘Boy, what do you mean? What am I going to do with boy? He’s an actor, he’s in a wheelchair on the Disney Channel.’ I’m like, ‘Boy, I don’t know how to make this work out.’”
In fairness the perspective is believable given where Jones sat in the industry at the time. He had made serious noise at Koch Records as both an artist and a power behind the scenes and later moved into the Atlantic Records system working artist and repertoire. Different era different metrics and sometimes the next wave is hard to see until it is everywhere.
Looking back now those eyebrow raising passes read like three separate sliding door moments in rap and R and B history. Jones is taking them in stride and keeping it real about how fast the culture moves and how even insiders can miss future legends when the branding is not obvious yet.