They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think they want to keep it separate, but I've never been a crossover artist for some reason.
To me, a big crossover was what happened to me years ago, like bringing my music in Spanish to Europe, or Asia. To me, that's a crossover because Spanish is not a language that everybody talks.
Kind of the sad thing is that - it's still true - a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.
I've always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.
I think, especially when you're on TV, once you become associated with one genre or the other, it's near impossible to break into the other one, even if you have experience with both.
I have no desire to become a crossover artiste, singing with microphones. I believe in opera; that it is something that young people would love if they had a chance to hear it.
But the idea of taking things and mixing them together is what I do in my music. I take hip-hop, R&B, pop, dance, funk and soul and mix it all together to get my own sound.
I'd like to see more crossover between white and black music. That's something I've been advocating for years.
The crossover wasn't happening. TV actors were TV actors, and film and stage actors were a whole different thing. And now there's just a lot of crossover.
I never thought that I would be creating my own 'cross-over' genre. What I did was very real and organic. I have worked in so many different styles so it all just came together.