I think what's keeping me making music - the money is great, but I make music for the visibility.
In the industry there's this whole mentality of working with someone who can open the door for you, but my whole thing is that I like my work to speak for itself. So I still do have that same mentality.
It may look like things have gotten better, because everyone is semi-being appreciative. Not appreciative, but conscious of people being gender fluid and all those things.
I think it's very important that LGBT narratives are spoken from LGBT perspectives. I think that what I do is important as far as creating a lane for myself to be independent.
I don't know [whether] if I didn't get paid, or my career didn't keep going where it goes, if I would keep doing music.
Every time someone asks me who I want to work with, my answer is always the same: whoever wants to work with me that won't want to get their ego stroked.
I'm a lot different in my career since that interview. To have someone like Diplo tweet "Cakes' album is really cool" is cool, but in the same breath I still like what I do without anyone's approval. It's still good music.
I've been working with Peaches for a while as far as doing shows, maybe for the past two years. Everyone else seems to think that this is a new relationship, but me and her have been touring off and on for a while now. I was doing my album and I needed that heavy-hitter.
I'm a SoundCloud, online kind of artist. It's not like back in the day when everyone was like linking up physically to do music. But with the album, I did have my first experience with meeting with a producer and us making things from scratch.
There are two singles I did with Noah Breakfast, ["Talkin Greezy" and "New Phone (Who Dis),"] which was a cool experience. So it's cool either way, I think. It depends on the relationship you have with the other person - not everybody is going to work the same way.
Sometimes I start with the beat. Sometimes I can write something down and it takes me a while to figure out how I want to say it or the beat I want to say it to. I definitely like to live the experiences that I cover.
I think each track tells a different story about what I'm going through. But overall it's just me being young, my love of alcohol, and my love of turning up.
Living New York, everyone has a million hustles, so I was doing party promoting, working the doors at parties, doing that whole nightlife thing.
My love of words, alcohol, and stage antics basically cemented me as a rapper, but it wasn't a career that I wanted to do. It was just, "I like to do all these things at one time."
I want to be respected as a writer and, like I said, I was really sick of people saying I was a two dimensional character. I want more to my legacy, I guess.
I was just doing it for fun. I was in college recording music as a joke, so I really didn't think that a career was feasible - being able to travel.
I do realize that I have a talent for making music. It wasn't anything expected, but I do think it's deserved, if that makes sense.
I started making music for fun maybe my senior year in college. I started rapping in high school, but it wasn't anything serious.
I don't think it was much of a forum for positive or negative feedback; it was mainly, "How can I make somebody laugh?" It wasn't a serious thing where I needed people to give me feedback.
I think when I dropped The Eulogy is when it became more [about] feedback because that's when Pitchfork wanted to review it and things like that.
If we actually supported these gay artists and pumped money behind them the same way they pump money behind these divas, a conversation of homophobia in hip hop wouldn't be. Because I would have the money and the revenue coming in. It's not about homophobia or who's going to push back. It's all about who's supporting you and where there's money from.
I write a lot. I used to write a lot of poetry when I was younger, write for my school newspapers. Also reading is very important because you need to be on your word game if you want to be a lyricist.
Not to sound egotistic, but I've gotten kind of good at it. It's something that came naturally to me, but my rapping is rooted in my writing.
I didn't choose to be a rapper; it's just my talent.
I am a rapper. The reason why I was against the whole rapper title is because I know so many people who want to be rappers and they're not.
