I think you get to a certain point in your life and where you grew up stops reminding you of when you grew up. Everything changes, everything metamorphosizes.
I can't sit in the same place. I gotta keep going.
There's a segment of this world, there's a mind state that's permeated the intellectual consciousness of this world that comes from a certain type of people that looks at me and you and your average individual as a problem - like a blight on an otherwise potential paradise, something that needs to be cured.
Everyone just wants to feel good, and I don't think that all music is designed to make you feel good.
I think that everyone who does music, and everyone who does art, or everyone who decides at a young age that they're gonna do that, is someone who feels like an outsider. The world is not really set up for that.
A good rapper is a good rapper, a good album is a good album. I don't think anyone is inherently good.
The only thing an artist is useful for, and the only reason why we don't just line 'em up against the wall and shoot them, is because, at their best, they're the reflection of our lives, that most regular people can't even afford to think about.
Change is a direct element of hip-hop. That's the whole thing with style.
There are two types of people, two types of performers: Performers who know how to keep a show going literally when the power is gone and performers who haven't had that much experience and will panic and freak out and don't know what to do.
I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.
At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.
We're not steadfast about not repeating mistakes.
I wanted people to know that I was making what I was making just on a sampler, basically.
I am trying to change hip-hop music because I do feel there are places people can go with production and the structure of an album that they haven't gone yet. But, like I said, I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I just want to make music that doesn't make me bored.
If you are a good writer you use your life experience to do something different than someone who is 20-years-old can do. That is where you get your power. That is our power as a group. I am not trying to make the same music I made 10 years ago.
I like being a rapper and cursing and getting paid. But at some point I feel like I'm going to be an old angry ass man, who is going to run the school board or city council.
The advancement of style is the cornerstone of hip hop. There is no correct or conservative way to make rap music. Rap is and must remain the answer, the alternative, to the conservative approach of making music.
I am making art. It's not a job that you've gotta show up to and fill in your slot. This is a dream come true. You get the opportunity to say something, to make a piece of art and hang it on the wall forever. Sometimes you're gonna have to take your time.
My relationship to Brooklyn is probably the relationship that any 40-year-old man has to his hometown, which is that this is where I live, this what I know, yet it's different, it's changed. My fascination with the city has maybe subsided and now it's just where I'm from, where I live.
I hope that people take away hope, maybe not in an obvious sense, but in the form of hearing somebody who's genuinely fighting to stay above water. And in that fight, there's hope. In that fight, maybe there's positivity.
Maybe my great struggle, and it's probably not anything different from too many other people, but it certainly is what drives the music, is a hugely internal one.
I couldn't really be a part of high school, because I have a terrible time doing things that I don't want to do. I'm not good at it. It's not even like, I'm a rebel. I'm just bad at it, you know?
At a young age, I really wanted to make music and make my own sort of thing. I'm sure if it wasn't music, it would have been writing, or it would have been maybe painting. I just always had the drive to try and make something with my hands and to just pull something out of myself and shape it and see it in front of me, if that makes any sense.
My father was a musician, and I've always loved writing. I grew up in New York City during a time when hip hop music was surrounding you with the hip hop culture, and it felt natural. I was a really huge fan of the music.
No doubt, there are times when I'm like "We have all gotten really used to saying whatever the f - k we want to say," and it's something that I really take seriously, whatever that may be.
