Fashion designer Steve Madden has an affinity for former Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight, and he really wants to meet No Limit Records founder Master P.
During an interview with Joe Budden on his Humans show on YouTube that aired last month, Madden explained the odd obsession he has with Suge Knight. Clips of the segment had been circulating online this week and showed the designer is a fan of Suge’s business-savvy mind.
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“I’m obsessed with Suge Knight. I never met him, I want to meet him,” Madden said while Budden revealed he’d met Suge and said he’s not someone you rush to meet. The businessman agreed and explained that’s precisely what intrigued him about the former music executive.
Joe Budden later asked Madden if he would ever visit Suge Knight in prison, which he said he wouldn’t but believes the former Death Row mogul is looked at in an unfair light by others and that should change.
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“Coming from where he came from, I think we need to cut him a little bit of a break. Although running over a guy probably not a great thing that he did,” Madden said. “I do admire the entrepreneurial spirit.”
The 64-year-old also revealed he wanted to meet Master P, saying: “I look up to Master P, I really admire Master P a lot. I was in prison with some guys from the projects that he was from. It was called the Calliope Projects in New Orleans. It just really, really tough projects and just where he comes from its amazing what he did with his business and everything.”
In 2002, Steve Madden was convicted of stock manipulation, money laundering, and securities fraud and sentenced to 41 months in prison. He served his time in a Federal Prison Camp at Eglin Air Force Base, and later the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, near Ocala, Florida.
That time in prison was an eye-opening experience for Madden, who also explained he was put on to Hip Hop by inmates, specifically tunes from the south.
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“I listened to southern Hip Hop which was like T.I. and all those, you know, those guys, that’s what we heard down there because I was in the south,” Madden said. “I remember, you know, that sort of like, that whole Atlanta and then Trick Daddy and all that stuff, and I would listen T.I.”
He continued: “I remember I really liked it, and then I got to meet T.I. when I got out of prison and hung out with him. I went to a party with him, and we had such a good time, we went to a Maxim party with Irv Gotti and we smoked cigars, and I pretended I was Suge Knight, but Suge Knight was not at the party because I think he ran over someone like a week before and killed them, so he wasn’t able to attend. I got to meet Nas at that party too.”
In another recent Suge Knight anecdote, former Death Row Records rapper RBX recalled a time he mistakenly ate chicken that belonged to Knight. The incident led to the demise of his relationship with Suge.
“The chicken situation. We go through the performance, we come back,” RBX explained to The Art of Dialogue last month, “there’s eight performers and eight bags of chicken sitting there. We had two shows and hadn’t eaten shit … [I had] an educated guess, there’s eight performers, we ain’t eaten … I grab the chicken; I get to popping.
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“Come to find out Suge come walking upstairs with a couple of his homies and that chicken he had bought for his boys. He get to tripping, tripping, woo-wop, wop, wop. I’m frustrated. I’m saying, ‘We up here making this money as a team. We starving. We can’t go — there’s eight of us and there’s 14,000 people out there … Do you know how we’d get mobbed?’
“When we got back home [Suge] got to doing some things that I just didn’t feel like was appropriate as a business — that was conducive to good business; so I felt like I needed to move around,” he said. “But if I’m gonna keep bumping heads with this dude it’s not gonna be a good thing.”
