How Idris Elba wrote a poem to hustle his way onto a Jay-Z album
Idris Elba is an actor first and foremost, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he took a Shakespearean style when making a request and went the poetry route to worm his way onto a classic album.
Idris Elba has revealed that he went the extra mile to hustle his way onto Jay-Z’s 2007 album American Gangster. In order to muscle his own space on the piece of hip-hop history, the actor wrote a poem and sent it off to his pal.
It’s not the only mega-star’s record he’s worked his way onto either. The Beasts of No Nation actor also ended up working his way onto Paul McCartney’s 2021 remix album McCartney III: Imagined. Pretty solid connections, but how did they come about Idris?
“Both these albums I’m on, and both those artists don’t know I’m on those albums,” Elba told Jimmy Fallon while on the Tonight Show to promote his new film, Beast. “You know what I mean? I literally hustled my own onto those albums.”
Elba continued: “At the time I hear Jay was about to do an album associated with the film. And I was like, ‘I need to get on that.’ As you do. You’re like, ‘I’m Idris, I need to be on that Jay-Z album.’ No idea why Jay would be like, ‘Yeah, sure, do it.’”
Thus, Elba penned a long poem, put it to a beat, and sent it off to Jay-Z. “I said, ‘Maybe I should speak this’ because Jay might be a little more accommodating to my speaking voice,” Elba recalled. “And I sent it to him, and we got this text back from Jay saying, ‘Um, I don’t love this…I fucking love it.’”
And there we have it; the rest is history. However, given the contribution that Elba made to the art of the American gangster entertainment oeuvre with The Wire, perhaps it’s only fitting that he features.
As for his new film, Beast comes with the following enticing synopsis: “A father and his two teenage daughters find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the Savanna has but one apex predator.”
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