DJ Green Lantern: I Have A 7 Year Old Unreleased Jay Z Mixtape
DJ Green Lantern has worked with an innumerable amount of hip hop acts over his career and one can safely assume he has a hard drive of music rap nerds would Break Bad over. In a recent interview with NahRight for their Mixtape Memories series, The Evil Genius reveals that a mixtape with Jay Z entitled Presidential Invasion was intended to come out weeks before Kingdom Come.
The idea for the mixtape surprised everyone initially especially Green Lantern:
The Jay tape that never came out was called Presidential Invasion. This is November 2006, like three weeks before Kingdom Come comes out. I’m on the world tour with Jay in September, October, and somehow he says something to the effect of, ‘When you do my tape, the shit better be hot!’ And I looked at him like, ‘Do your tape?!?! Don’t play with me!’ So that turned in to [him saying], ‘Fuck it, let’s do a tape!’ And I’m like, ‘Really?! You serious?!’
Green Lantern also reveals that the epic “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)” originally was Jay Z freestyle that was pasted in. In addition, Green says The Roots’ John Legend-sampled “Doing It Again” was close to being a Jay Z song four years prior to its release.
The 37 year old producer/DJ’s reluctance to release the unheard music stems from a reprimand he received from Hov himself following Green’s unauthorized leak of “Jay’s Back, ASAP”:
Got a call [from Jay] the next day, like, ‘Yo listen. Just call me, just ask me. If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s people putting my shit out without asking me. Because it’s my shit.’ So I was like, ‘You know what? I gotta respect that.’ So now everything’s locked up. I’m not touching anything.
