I've never met Eminem; you don't meet Eminem. He has his own secret service.
I don't know where people think I'm from, but I'm from Chicago. It's really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, 'There's two sides to it, and it's a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.' But it's really just a very scummy place where people don't have respect for other people's lives.
To me, I feel like basketball and hip-hop have always been kinda conjoined because they're very similar in their competitive nature, you know what I'm sayin'? It's about technical skill, and then there's just God-given talent.
One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.
Chicago is a beautiful city - the architecture, the food, everything in the city is awesome.
The whole tape [Dedication 5] is amazing. It's my favourite accomplishment [working with Lil Wayne] and I say that with thought. It's the biggest accomplishment I've made today, because Lil Wayne is probably the biggest reason why I'm sitting here right now, rapping and doing what I do. I'm a huge Wayne fan forever.
People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!
I dont really like meetings, I like recording and performing music. I need to set myself up for when the time does come that I need better distribution or just a bigger team behind me.
I think even before I knew I wanted to be a rapper, I wanted to be an entertainer. I was really into Michael Jackson as a kid.
My come-out record, '10 Day,' was the thing people were supposed to hear and figure out 'he's good' or 'he's not good.' 'Acid Rap' is the comeback tape, and it asks way bigger and better questions than, 'Is he good at rapping?
It's important to go against the grain. My favorite celebrity, across arts and sports and everything, is Muhammad Ali. And he was famous for speaking inflammatory things that were polarizing but also were important to building who he was as a man and his legacy. And in the end, he was right about most of the s... he was talkin' about.
Both of my parents graduated from high school, both attended college, both have government jobs now. They've always been very adamant about me finishing high school and finishing college.
Jeremih has been my favorite artist to collab with.
It wasn't until I left that I realised it's not weird to grow up in certain cities and, by the age of 27 or 28, for all of your friends to still be alive. I can think of a lot of kids that I knew in Chicago who were supposed to grow up but didn't.
