Art & Creativity Quote by Jermaine Dupri

Dupri’s candor lands because it admits what hip-hop and pop rarely say out loud: status isn’t only earned by hits, it’s curated through taste. “I wanted to feel like an artist” reads less like insecurity than a critique of the assembly-line perception of producers. Dupri has long been seen as a hitmaker-entrepreneur, a specialist in polish and radio math. Here he’s reaching for a different credential, one that can’t be measured in chart position: being legible as someone with aesthetic curiosity, someone in conversation with the culture rather than simply extracting from it.

The phrase “use other producers for respect” is deliberately ugly, and that’s why it works. He doesn’t dress it up as “collaboration” or “community.” He names the transaction: bringing in outside producers is a public signal, a way of proving you’re listening, that your sound isn’t hermetically sealed. In a genre where authenticity is policed and influence is a currency, outsourcing becomes paradoxically intimate. You “use” someone’s sonic vocabulary to show you’re paying attention.

The subtext is anxiety about solipsism: “on my own page” suggests the fear of becoming a closed loop, repeating your own tricks until they turn into a brand parody. Dupri is also nodding to a long-standing hierarchy where the producer can be framed as technician while the “artist” gets the aura. By seeking out other producers, he’s trying to borrow not just sounds but symbolism: the humility of a listener, the credibility of a student, the modern flex of curatorship.