Why did Roc-A-Fella break up? Memphis Bleek opens up about Jay-Z leaving the record label crew
Memphis Bleek opened up about Jay-Z leaving the record label crew, Roc-A-Fella Records, in a new interview with The Breakfast Club on June 16, 2025. Bleek, who was part of Roc-A-Fella's core during its rise in the late 1990s and early 2000s, acknowledged that the Young Forever rapper had no choice but to step back to grow as an artist and a businessman.
“I knew he had to. For Jay to be where he at, he couldn’t be around us every day. I’m a liability,” Bleek explained.
As Bleek put it, the gap between his lifestyle and Jay’s aspirations only widened over time. He said,
“It’s not that he don’t rock with you, or don’t rock with us. It’s, ‘Aye, dawg, I’m over here gettin’ to these millions, ya still in the club poppin’ bottles. I don’t need that look.’”
Memphis Bleek said he 'warned' others about Jay-Z leaving Roc-A-Fella
While Bleek’s latest comments were made in the Breakfast Club interview, this isn’t the first time he has spoken publicly about the unraveling of Roc-A-Fella. In a 2023 appearance on Drink Champs, he said he saw the crew breaking up before others did.
According to Bleek, Jay-Z even warned him directly, saying,
“The scissors… they coming,”
In his Drink Champs interview, Bleek also said he had several one-on-one conversations with Roc-A-Fella artists urging them to get their affairs in order. He remembers telling them,
“Y’all better hope y’all got a retirement plan. Put this sh*t together. You see him [Jay-Z], he getting out of here. He telling y’all, Black Album, fade to black, it’s over.”
According to Bleek, these "warnings" did not make a difference. The Round Here singer also stated that some of the inaction was due to image management and internal allegiances. According to him, some artists were more loyal to Dame Dash because of his industry “connections,” even though Jay-Z had “the bag-and the bag brings the connections.”
More on what Memphis Bleek said about the crew breaking up
According to Bleek, another factor contributing to the crew's breakup was a lack of trust and communication, particularly with Beanie Sigel. During The Breakfast Club interview, the rapper said that he tried to offer Sigel some advice about the launch of his State Property clothing line and questioned the manufacturing arrangement.
Sigel allegedly responded by calling him a “hater" and bringing up his loyalty to Jay-Z, and said that was what drove a wedge between them,
"this is when I knew me and Beans’ relationship wasn’t the same — because he was like, ‘Yo, it sound like you hatin’ on me, fam,’ and I’m like, ‘What you mean?’ And he’s like, ‘If Jay your man like you say, why you ain’t got no record label?'”
The last straw between Jay-Z and the rest of the Roc-A-Fella group was about leadership and control. In the 2023 Drink Champs interview, Bleek talked about an important moment on the set of the Change Clothes video.
According to Bleek, Dame Dash was trying to control the label's direction and told him directly that if he disagreed, he’d be given his “walking papers.”
Memphis Bleek pushed back, telling Dash he didn’t have the power to make that decision. According to the Infatuated singer, the real boss had always been Jay-Z, who eventually found out about the altercation. He further stated that this was the symbolic end of Roc-A-Fella as a unified crew.
While rumors and speculation, including theories involving the late singer Aaliyah, have circulated over the years, Bleek dismissed those as irrelevant, saying he did not know any such factors.
