00:00I grew up in New Jersey, and you could go to New York and become a whole different person.
00:04So we used to go to the city, and, you know, my name was not Latifah when I was born, you know,
00:09it's a name that I chose, and Queen Latifah was an identity that I felt for myself,
00:16but my name is Dana Owens, you know, so in the music and in the city, I got to create who I wanted to be.
00:22I got to become who I saw myself as and create this persona, and that in itself
00:28was creating a brand, and for, you know, you ask about the business, where did that come from,
00:34we all sat around, we would sit around and talk about people like James Brown,
00:39we'd talk about Sammy Davis, we'd talk about all the older, you know, people who came before us,
00:43you have to look at the history, you got to look back to know where you came from,
00:47and we would look at a lot of artists who sold their publishing, who got a car for their music,
00:53who didn't own anything, and they wrote so many songs, and they wound up destitute, broke,
01:00you know what I mean, and we didn't want to be that, and we already had these so-so contracts
01:05that we, you know, we were in. I was in a decent contract, but the whole reason Flavor Unit was
01:10created was for us to get our boys out of these terrible contracts that they were in, you know,
01:17so, you know, once I kind of got some success, we created the company, me and Shaquem, and my mom,
01:24once we started that, it was really about, okay, we got this lawyer, I got some success, I'm doing well,
01:31let's try to see if we can leverage this to go renegotiate their contracts, and that's what we
01:36started doing, we started going down the line of each one of our homeboys, and getting them out of
01:41these slave contracts, and basically renegotiating better contracts for them, and because we started
01:47doing that with some success, everybody in the business started to look around and say, well,
01:51damn, how are they doing that, and they started to kind of come to us, and we wound up managing
01:55Monica, and Naughty by Nature, and OutKast, and, you know, on and on, SWV, just Faith, you name it,
02:03we just grew.
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