Damon Dash - Contributed

The following is an interview done with music mogul Damon Dash, by Russell Myrie for The Voice magazine. The Voice is a Gleaner publication.

What will Damon 'Dame' Dash do next? That was the 64-thousand-dollar question when the original trio behind the wildly successful Rocafella Records (and spin-offs like Rocawear) parted ways a few years ago.

When Dame, Shawn Carter (aka Jay-Z) and silent partner Kareem 'Biggs' Burke split, it was thought that the Dame Dash Music Group (DDMG) would release music by artistes like Nicole Wray, Rell and maybe even Beanie Sigel.

However, distribution deals with Universal and then Koch have not, as yet, produced any fruits. Beanie Sigel has said that, in order to maintain his mutual friendships, he doesn't want to work with either Dame or Jay alone if he can't work with both of them together.

The renowned cake-a-holic, Dash, then began rolling with dancehall legend Sizzla, but that was more in the vein of a friend helping a friend rather than a manager/artist type situation.

Dame also dabbles in film. But we haven't seen anything since the intelligent thought-provoking flick The Woodsman.

Sneaker line

Of course, there are things like his line of Pro-ked sneakers, his Tiret watches and the like. But ventures like that, profitable though they may be, don't really daze and amaze the masses anymore. An ever-growing number of successful American rappers and athletes have their own sneaker lines. Furthermore, only a handful of ballers will be able to afford Tiret watches. So how can he re-connect with the people? Blocksavvy is the answer.

"About a year ago we were looking at all this new technology that was coming out and I was doing the television show with my man Kwame," Dame says of his stint on the U.S. reality show Ultimate Hustler. "... Kwame was doing all of the hologram stuff and he presented the idea of Blocksavvy to me. He was telling me about the technology and how it compares to everyone else's. I was like, "I'm with it. I know that's gonna be the next big thing." So nine, 10 months later, I feel we got something that's better than anything out there. It's sort of like a myspace on steroids, a social networking site that has, to a degree, a virtual economy."

Pay attention, here's the meat and potatoes of the whole shebang: "You start with some money and the more you use, the more you make," Dame continues. "For the young guys, we're trying to put some degree of knowledge out there of budgeting, economics and making money. While having some kind of fun. You have a 3D room, the ability to buy things, and people have the ability to buy things from your room. On top of that, you can kind of interact with youtube and myspace without leaving the site."

Invited guests

Still confused? Log on to Blocksavvy.com and the picture will hopefully become clearer. However, unlike myspace or youtube you have to be invited to join by an existing member. Kwame Decuir, the brains behind Blocksavvy, breaks it down a little further.

"There's also a real business model behind it, as well. We didn't want to bombard people with over-advertising. But how can we still leverage brands and use brands and sort of promote and launch things without killing everybody? Everything is based on product placement.

"The whole room concept came up like that. It's part myspace, part monopoly, part shopping and sort of them all into one. Blocksavvy is more of a complimentary concept, we wanna work with the web instead of trying to control it or whatever. You could say to yourself, "I might not be able to buy the real Rolex but I can buy the virtual Rolex. But the good thing about that is that its tied into a real product. So if you really, really wanted to buy it for real, you could. You don't have to. It doesn't cost any money to join, once you get invited, we have our own virtual economy with savvy dollars."

But why the name Blocksavvy? "We didn't want to come out with anything obvious. Everyone has space, next to their name. Also we span a lot of different genres and we didn't want it to be labelled as just a hip-hop thing, it's for everybody. Blocksavvy means street smart, so we wanted to come up with something that was clever but also elegant at the same time. It doesn't pigeonhole us, but it explains what it is."

Mud slinging

Lastly, Dame was bound to get caught up in all the recent back and forth mud slinging between his fellow Harlem representers Dip Set and his former homie turned president of Def Jam, Jay Z.

Seeing as this is a beef that will never turn violent, it's okay to talk about it a bit. Dame shows up shouting his head off about this and that on Jimmy's Kingdom Done remix. We had to ask.

"To be honest I didn't know that that song was gonna be completed. Months before I did a skit for his album and I just basically said that everyone should know me and Jimmy have known each other for a long time and that's basically it.

"Those are my little brothers and they do whatever they wanna do. They called me like 'are you mad?' I said 'yeah, I'm mad'. But I let it go. I'm really taking a break from music and focusing on things like Blocksavvy, Pro-keds, and my wife's line, the Rachel Roy collection."