Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
I met Mos Def around that time but I didn't hook up with him until I was about 17 or 18.
So I just had to step up how I was doing it and the moment that I stepped up and the moment I focused all my energy on that is when things started to happen. So there's a direct relationship between my inspiration and my output.
I don’t think that early hip hop stood out to be a social critique. A lot of fans of mine think that hip hop’s ultimate responsibility is to critique social structures.
Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.
Who you? Your name smaller than fine grains in couscous It's the highest calibre, your calibre is deuce deuce
We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.
I look at the deejay thing as something - I'm good at it because I have my own music. I have enough rhythm to blend at this point.
I have a luxury of people coming to see me whether I play for the crowd or not. I don't take that lightly.
I feel like your city - with hip hop in particular, because we're always beating our chest and shouting where we're from - your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York - KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.
My parents are my biggest influences. My parents and my city. Brooklyn, New York, New York City, the community I grew up. I don't feel like I'm special in that. I feel like that's everybody.
I'm spinning records and I look across the restaurant and I see somebody who looks Asian. And I'm like, "Yo, that looks like Yoko Ono." I'm like, oh, I can just meet - that's going to be great. Then I look carefully and I'm like, "That's not Yoko Ono, that's Bruno Mars." And it was Bruno Mars. That just happened recently. I was bugging out. Because that was totally not Yoko Ono at all.
We speak the love language, they speak from pain and anguish. Some don't love theyselves, so they perception is tainted.
But Rawkus is integral to what I do, because the cats who started Rawkus are the first ones who really saw my vision, and gave me a platform to get it out there, so I'm definitely totally grateful for that.
But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.
Music is not an exact science so depending on the time and the mode and the energy when we do it that will determine what happens with it.
Let me finish my music, and let me present it the way I want to present it. And then share it, put it online, do whatever you want to do after that.
I'd like to work with Outkast, I'd like to work with RZA, I'd like to work with Timbaland, York, a whole bunch of people.
I will never do a record without some sense of responsibility.
I was always rhyming and doing it for the love before I found out I was gonna have children and when I found out, doing it for the love wasn't enough.
I think its man's nature to go to war and fight.
I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.
Fortunately, artists can live off their works, if you're creative at how you do it. If you just depend on the videos and the radio, you're at a loss.
Woman are complex creatures.
Even an independent label is looking for a hit, they're not looking for a record that's not gonna do well.
