We're creeping up on two decades since Jay Z and DMX dropped the Swizz Beatz-produced "Money, Cash, Hoes." That song, taken from Jay's star-making Vol 2: Hard Knock Life, was a major hit at rap radio, and boiled the trio's credo down to a simple, winking taunt: "Why would I give a fuck? I'm just a crook on a song." Near the turn of the century, Swizz was embodying hip-hop at its most antagonistically excessive, and the only thing he seemed to be collecting were the all-terrain vehicles from the Ruff Ryders videos. But in the years since, he's become known as quite the art aficionado, and now, it's time to make it official. According to The Wall Street Journal, the producer--born Kasseem Dean--will be joining the Brooklyn Museum's Board of Trustees.

Swizz was elected to the Board last week alongside Barbara Vogelstein, the philanthropist and one-time partner at private equity firms Apax Partners and Warburg Pincus LLC. The producer and rapper says that he started educating himself about art once his music hit it big, and for year's he's been mentally building The Dean Collection, which Swizz describes as “this imaginary museum I had at one time in my head for my kids." The former Ruff Ryders MVP, who scored his first top-ten hit in 2004 with Cassidy and R. Kelly's "Hotel," has been married to the singer Alicia Keys since 2010; the pair have two children together.

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