Don’t believe everything you hear. Especially if the one airing the business doesn’t know what he’s talking about says Brooklyn rapper Joell Ortiz. After rumors when swirling about his departure from Aftermath records, the rapper is finally setting the story straight.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell it the way I wanted to tell it because a person who didn’t know about the situation commented on it,” Joell said in a recent interview with Hip-Hop insider Miss Info. [Watch video below]

Former labelmate, Bishop Lamont, leaked Ortiz’s business during a recent radio interview, saying that he got dropped from Aftermath. Not true, says Joell.

“It was just someone speaking about a situation they know nothing about. Me and Dr. Dre deal the way me and Dr. Dre deal.,” Joell said. “It’s all good, he just didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Turns out Joell wasn’t dropped from the label, he actually asked for a release.

His labelmates weren’t turning out their projects quickly enough and Ortiz isn’t one to sit around and wait.

“Over there they wasn’t … y’know they got the Detox, y’know Eminem trying to do a new record and stuff … no knock to them, but I can’t sit around,” the Brooklyn lyricist said.

Fans have been waiting on that new Dre album for nearly eight years, while Em has all but retired.

“I can’t afford to wait because that would be the most selfish thing to do,” he said. “I got a million people depending on me to come out. People wanna hear Joell Ortiz,” he said.

And there’s still no beef. Joell said he has his hand in Dr. Dre’s long awaited Detox album and is still working with the mega producer.

“We had a record deal,” he said. “Now we still have our thing going on … You still gonna hear me on the Doctor beat. Everything is beautiful.”

Ortiz dropped his first album The Brick (Bodega Chronicles) via Koch records in April last year while still signed to Aftermath.

“I wanted to drop an indie

to get my fan base up, but it so happened that Dre was feeling it and they came at the same time,” the rapper told SOHH in a previous interview. “With The Brick, I wrote it when I was still on the grind, before the deal. People been beating me in the head with ‘you gotta bring New York back’ but New York never died, you can’t kill it.”

Joell, now a free agent, said he’ll be dropping a mixtape soon, and that hes currently in a label bidding war.

“I have momentum now,” he said. “I gotta move with the cheese. I don’t know when my window of opportunity is gonna open again. I gotta take advantage of it now. I need to be dropping asap.”

- SOHH.com