The rapper stopped by ET Live on Tuesday, where he shared how he's 'moving forward' from 2017's ill-fated festival.
Ja Rule is moving forward and staying positive.
The 43-year-old rapper stopped by ET Live on Tuesday, where he looked back on Fyre Festival, the ill-fated "luxury" event he backed in 2017. Ja Rule's involvement was already featured in two documentaries (one for Netflix and one for Hulu) and is currently being played out on Growing Up Hip Hop: New York. Despite the disastrous outcome of the festival and all the negative attention it received, the Queens, New York, native is now opening up about why he has no regrets.
"It's the most iconic festival that never happened," Ja Rule joked to ET's Jason Carter, adding that he's actually "never watched" the documentaries. "I mean, I've lived it. I lived through the moment, I lived through all the craziness online, all the backlash of it all. I took it all like a champ like I was the only guy involved in the situation. But it's OK. It's cool because going forward, what I'm looking to do, is to make the situation right and have an amazing festival."
"It's so crazy because I'm a person that doesn't regret anything. If it happened, it happened," he added. "I try to look at everything as the glass half full. There was a lot of bad that came with the Fyre Festival, obviously, but there were some good things there too. A lot of lessons were learned. I'm taking all that into consideration going into my next venture."
Ja Rule continued on, quoting a line the legendary Master P recently shared at a seminar in Los Angeles. "He said, 'An L is not a loss, it's a lesson,'" Ja Rule recalled. "I say that a lot too because it is [true]. When something bad happens and it's at that magnitude, you learn a lot from that."
"Going forward, it's not like you're dead and you stop doing business. You're still going to do business and your life goes on," he explained. "But you've learned so much from that failure that you go forward and it makes your moves a hundred times stronger."
As ET previously reported, hundreds of festivalgoers -- who paid between $1,000 and $125,000 for tickets and were promised gourmet food and luxurious accommodations -- were left stranded in the Bahamas in April 2017 after arriving to an unfinished site with underwhelming arrangements and a lack of food and staffing.
Fyre Festival founder and promoter Billy McFarland was later arrested and is currently serving a six-year prison sentence for wire fraud. Ja Rule said that moving onward from this moment in his life also means cutting off all contact with McFarland.
"No contact. Yeah, I'm done," Ja Rule said of where their relationship stands today. "I'm doing me now. We're not lighting more fires; we're putting the fire out."
Ja Rule is now focused on his own ventures, including his upcoming album, 12.Twelve.XII, which drops Dec. 12 and marks his first since 2012's Pain Is Love 2.
"It's about a spiritual journey, shedding your past, transgressions and things and moving forward," he teased. "I can't wait to put it out, man. My sound is my sound. Over the course of five, 10 years now we've heard growth of that sound in many ways."
"I think what the new artists have done is taken that sound that I kind of made cool and popular when I was doing it, they've taken it to a whole new level, which gives me the autonomy to go make this album and really go with it no holds barred," he raved. "Whereas maybe when I was doing it back in the day -- like, I've made whole records back in the day where I sang the whole record, but I end up sellin' 'em ... because I can't sing these records. But now I can. Now it's the norm for a rapper!"
Ja Rule added that it is "definitely a hip-hop, rap, pop, rock" album.
"It's a sound like none other," he shared. "I'm just experimenting with different sounds and I'm having a lot of fun making it."
Growing Up Hip Hop: New York airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on WE tv. Hear more in the video below.
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