I don't bask in the awards I've won, read my bank statements, I refuse. To me, that's how you start losing the hunger.
I grew up in somewhat of a war zone in West Philadelphia in 1985, '86. It wasn't as extreme as someone coming in the classroom and just unloading on a class, but I knew to take the scenic route to go to the grocery store to avoid certain elements.
Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.
I don't think crack happened by accident. I'm part conspiracy theorist, because you can't develop something that dangerous and have it not be planned.
You can't live off of just greasy fatty foods and stayin' up till six in the mornin' just partyin'. You gotta take care of yourself.
I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.
I hate videos. I'm meticulous on everything from cover art, fonts, productions, mixing. But when it comes to videos, I just feel so defeated.
The Chronic represented everything that I hated about hip-hop as a fan, but then later represented everything that I stood for as a musician and engineer.
Crack offered a lot of money to the inner-city youth who didn't go to college. Which enabled them to become businessmen. I know about maybe five people in the entertainment industry who did their peak work as a result of crack usage.
Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.
At the end of the day, I don't release any records that I'm not proud to put my name on. I never got to that point.
I was one of those skeptics that thought that yoga was for kooks. Now I'm on a very strict regimen. You know, I work out. That's another thing I've learned relaxin', sleep, yoga. I didn't know that that's as crucial as going hard, as workin' hard, as exercising hard. I never knew. I thought that, "Okay, I gotta be at the gym like five hours everyday going balls to the wall." And what my yoga instructor, what my trainer, what they're trying to teach me is that, "No, it's sleep." That's important. That's just as important as workin' out.
The president is just the coach of a football team. You need the right support, the right stadium, the right players, the right staff. An excellent coach is not going to win games.
In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.
My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there's a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in black people. The best example is, Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hiphop.
Kurt Cobain represents a very legit, realistic outlook. Before that, in my head, to be a white artist was to be privileged.
I don't believe in good music and bad music anymore. I'm through with that phase of my life. Sometimes I just wanna feel good, so I put on a good record. But mostly I'm more of a businessman than a music fan, so I'm listening to music in terms of, is this effective or not effective?
I hear a lot of cries of socialism and certainly real disguises of "Why should I share my money with these people?" We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."
I cannot keep a girlfriend longer than seven months. I have 12 jobs. I don't have time for my personal life. I'm fully aware that this is the sacrifice.
I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.
I was born at a very crucial time. I consider 1968 to be the Mason Dixon line between pre- and post-civil rights generation ideas, whereas a lot of people born before '68 they kind of went into that Moses mentality. Like, I'm not going to make it, you know, I don't have any hope.
What I'm slowly realizing is that I believe that most of us felt that we could relax a little bit after November 2, 2008, because of the progress and the spirit that it took to get Barack Obama in The White House. And what we didn't realize, is that was really the beginning. That was really the beginning of the struggle and not the end of a struggle, to come from colonial times through slavery, through the Jim Crowe Laws, through the civil rights period to The White House as, like a point A/point B journey. Point B of course being the end.
Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.
Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.
Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.
