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Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It's part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

I know about hip-hop culture, whether it's graffiti writing or DJ-ing or being an MC.

I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace.

Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.

Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.

I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.