He’s been patiently waiting to blow. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Jadakiss show. With more determination and cockiness than a young Cassius Clay, NYC’s most respected lyricist is ready to join the ranks of hip-hop superstardom. It’s no laughing matter.

Jadakiss has a crew of double-R workers in stitches. Don’t worry, today’s weapon of choice isn’t a box cutter. Rather, it’s ’Kiss’ matter-of-fact sense of humor—an amalgamation of Muhammad Ali boast and Tony Soprano brawn—that’s cutting up the room at Ruff Ryders’ Powerhouse recording facility.

“Kiss…” he says in his raspy baritone. “My…” Pregnant pause. “Ass... That’s going to be the name of my third album.” The studio soldiers barrel over in exaggerated laughter, while raw tracks from ’Kiss’ second solo album, Kiss Of Death—his best, most thoughtful body of work thus far—play beneath the gales. “All y’all niggas that tried to hate on the kid—kiss… my… ass!” Bopping across the room like a carb-loving George Jefferson, stroking his plump, baby-faced grill, he considers his declaration. “That’s a million-dollar idea. I’m taking that one straight to Iovine.”

This stand-up routine is ostensibly spontaneous—unscripted like Larry David’s smash on Home Box Office. But as ’Kiss travels deeper into his skit, it proves far too detailed and precise to be completely ad-lib. Less freestyle, more prepped. Observe:

’Kiss envisions Eminem producing the record’s first single—an uptempo number, he says, the title track. He knows this is no mere pipe dream, because Eminem once told him that based on his skills—mean metaphors and a flow more on time than taxes—he “‘should have blown already.’” Besides, ’Kiss reasons, “Em can’t wait to tell everybody to kiss his ass anyway.”

He has an overarching theme for the album in mind as well. This far-away third LP will speak to the working class who get slighted day in, day out—like a ghetto Office Space on wax. Your boss passed you up for a promotion? Listen to Kiss My Ass. The landlord won’t lay off despite the fact you’ve been laid off? Listen to Kiss My Ass. The public refuses to recognize your gangsta? Well, fuck it, listen to Kiss My Ass.

“I get tired of people coming up to me talkin’ about how nice I am,” says ’Kiss, bemoaning the fact that the enthusiasm of the record-buying public has yet to match that of his peers. “I get tired of people like Em, B.I.G., Rakim—all the fuckin’ great people [telling me I’m good]. I get so tired that it makes me wanna quit… I been in the game since ’94. It’s 2004. I gotta dime in.”

As ’Kiss’ show-me-the-money short loses steam, the room goes quiet. The man who’s yet to reach the million-sold mark slices the dead air and takes a bow. “Word. The name of the third album, after I blow like [Biggie did] on Life After Death, is Kiss… My… Ass.”

Save the frustrated rapper diatribe—there is, in fact, a glaring confidence exuded by 29-year-old Jason Phillips. As far as MCs go, he is terminal, as in sick. Has been since the day he called hopeful rapper Kid Poetic his bitch and wished him Happy Valentine’s Day to end his first battle at Yonkers’ School Street Gym. He walks around with a superior swagger (“I could catch Alzheimer’s disease and still not get fuckin’ dropped”), and has no qualms about referring to himself as the driving force of his Ruff Ryders clan; he says he considered himself the straw that stirred the double-R drink well before Earl “DMX” Simmons headed for the Hollywood Hills.

“I’ve been waiting to be looked at as the leader for the longest,” says ’Kiss, whose trio the Lox signed on to co-CEOs Darrin “Dee” and Joaquin “Waah” Dean’s already successful stable in 1999. “I felt like I was the leader when DMX and them was still here.”

There are no pauses for effect after this bold assertion. Nor is there a nervous twitch, smirk, shoulder shrug or cowardly cop-out explanation. All there is, in typical Jadakiss fashion, is a matter-of-fact ending. “But you gotta treat everything like school. Freshman, sophomore, junior, senior… now it’s my turn.”

It is indeed ’Kiss’ turn to be fulfilled; to remind the world why Notorious B.I.G. pulled him aside and humbly requested—pending Lox partners Sheek and Styles’ blessing—they do songs together. Musically speaking, ’Kiss, who flatly admits he’s never put forth maximum effort in a soundproof booth, is far from content. He won’t tell you that his 2001 solo debut Kiss Tha Game Goodbye was high on punch lines but low on poignancy. He won’t admit that the album fell short of his standards. But he doesn’t have to; subconsciously his excuses do it for him. “I like that album,” he starts. “You know, for my first time coming out. I had fun making it, anyway, but there was a lot of bullshit involved.”

Bullshit meaning politics, and dollars and cents. As ’Kiss tells it, back in ’99, on the tail end of their “Let the Lox Go” campaign—an attempt to get the trio off Sean “Puffy” Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment roster—Ruff Ryders shelled out $3,000,000 to provide ’Kiss, Styles and Sheek their 40 acres. In addition, according to ’Kiss, Puff added a clause in the release contracts stating that he was to receive $300,000 off of ’Kiss’ first solo LP. [Bad Boy representatives did not respond to XXL’s attempts to confirm these numbers, but a quick check of the album’s credits reveals that Puff retains publishing rights to every song.] Good business on the part of the man ’Kiss refers to as a “paper gangster,” but it dealt a damaging blow to the Kiss Tha Game Goodbye budget.

What’s more, for the recording of the album, ’Kiss changed his surroundings. Rather than rely on the dank Yonkers atmosphere that had pervaded the creation of the two Lox group albums, he rented a mansion (formerly owned by Al Capone, nonetheless) on Miami’s posh Palm Island and “lived it up.” There were palm trees, a guest house, a pool. The New China Chinese restaurant and McDonald’s were replaced with “chefs and butlers, just fuckin’ up the budget,” ’Kiss summarizes.

But three years can change many things—focus, relationships, business. ’Kiss has indeed graduated, but he’ll be the first to tell you that matriculation is a bitch.

Your musical focus has sharpened since we last spoke three years ago. Has anything in particular caused this?

Last year, somebody stole almost $100,000 in cash from me. Not at one time, but at two different times. One wop and then another wop. I never found it, so that’s just like a murder that’s waiting to happen… I’m ready to throw it all away.

Do you have any suspects?

I never really stopped investigating it, but I had to fall back off it to try and stay focused and make the album and maintain my sanity. I think about it a lot. And that just made me be like, I gotta see who’s who. Maybe it’s my fault for slacking, but that just turned me around. That pulled the rage out of me and made me wanna channel it into some other shit. So I figure the best thing to do is just spill it on the album.

How devastating was that blow financially?

One hundred thousand cash is $100,000 cash no matter who you are. Whoever you are, it’s gonna hurt. You gonna feel it. I mean, I ain’t stay in the house for weeks or none of that and just go crazy, but I’m gonna hurt somebody.

Raised an only child in Yonkers, NY, ’Kiss developed some selfish characteristics. He was pampered. He’d have the new Air Jordans as soon as they came out, he remembers, and he spent summers away at camp in Pennsylvania (where fellow campers dubbed the well-fed youngster “Cheeseburger”). His mother, Debbie Phillips, walked him to school on the first day of classes up until 11th grade.

“He was really very spoiled,” says Mrs. Phillips, who worked as a teacher at a residential children’s home in Yonkers. “I know I had everything to do with that. Despite the fact that it was very difficult at times, we always seemed to find a way. I wanted to make my son happy.”