![]() explains that he has reasons for no longer living in a dangerous neighborhood: “Some move away to make a way, not move away cause they afraid/ I brought back to the hood, and all you ever did was take away.” And he shows some real contempt for his peers: “Your values is a disarray, prioritizin’ horribly/ Unhappy with the riches ’cause you’re piss-poor morally.” Instead, he addresses his haters: “Consider them my protege, homage I think they should pay/ Instead of bein’ gracious, they violate in a major way.” T.I. doesn’t really talk to those soldiers on the song. shouts out “all my soldiers over there in Iraq,” a rare pop-song acknowledgment of things that were actually happening in the world. raps from the perspective of a disappointed elder who doesn’t think his younger peers pay him the respect that he’s due. adapted a melodic singsong flow on “ Whatever You Like,” his previous chart-topper, he’s in rapper mode on the “Live Your Life” verses. Just Blaze might’ve written the hook as a spiteful message to an ex, but T.I. recorded while waiting to serve out his year-long prison sentence for gun possession. “Live Your Life” found its home on Paper Trail, the album that T.I. I generally preferred Just Blaze’s beats, which felt like a whole new mutation of classic East Coast boom-bap. Just Blaze is one of this century’s greatest sample-flipping producers, but most of the tracks that he sampled did not sound like “Dragostea Din Tei.” In the early ’00s, Just Blaze and Kanye West were the two producers who revolutionized Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella sound, adding concussive drums to chopped-up and sped-up soul samples. I always forget that Just Blaze made the “Live Your Life” beat, and I’m always shocked when someone reminds me. Soon enough, Just Blaze’s joke-song became the biggest hit of his career. called Just, telling him that he needed a record right away. That was definitely a Jedi mind trick of sorts.” A day after Just Blaze made the beat, T.I. They’re automatically gonna hear that chant, and it’s gonna be familiar to them. This fat kid singing video has gone super-viral everyone around the world has seen it. On that podcast, Just says, “At a certain point, I started to strategize. ![]() Instead, the track developed into its own thing. Just Blaze came up with the “Live Your Life” hook because he was mad at his ex-girlfriend, and the song stopped being a joke once he’d written that hook. As I started doing it - I did the core of it, the homie Canei came through and added some strings and played my horns over - things started coming to me, lyric-wise and concept-wise.” On a podcast with Talib Kweli last year, Just said, “I was looking at it, like ‘Yo, we should make something out of this’ - just to be silly, throw it up on MySpace. Justin “Just Blaze” Smith - a New Jersey native like Gary Brolsma - had seen the “Numa Numa” video. Just Blaze thought he was joking when he made the “Live Your Life” beat. ![]() O-Zone broke up in 2005, but that video had its own viral moment in the wake of Gary Brolsma’s dancing. The “Dragostea Din Tei” video featured the hairgelled-up Euro-dudes of O-Zone dancing on a plane’s wing while its engines turned into giant CGI speakers. Instead, the track in question was “Dragostea Din Tei,” a 2003 single from a Moldovan dance-pop group called O-Zone. The song was not called “Numa Numa,” though that’s the name that most Americans knew it by. The weirdly addictive song that made Gary Brolsma dance like that had its own ridiculous video. Brolsma’s video would have long-term effects, and one of those effects would smash its way to the top of the Hot 100 a few years later. Millions of people watched Gary Brolsma dance, and The New York Times reported that a humiliated Brolsma had gone into hiding at his parents’ house. Brolsma’s video, which quickly became known as “Numa Numa,” went up on a pre-YouTube site called Newgrounds, and it put Brolsma right into the early-viral-video hall of fame alongside Tay Zonday and lonelygirl15 and the Star Wars kid.
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