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There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

Americans are crazy. They have this fascination with throwing their shoes on stage. I've been to a lot of shows in me life, some good and some bad. But I was never moved to take off me shoes and throw it at the lead singer.

We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.

It was just us lampooning our own peer group, saying, well hey, where did this stuff come from? And where does British guys get to be so good at it suddenly?

Why do you think the fans like us - why they prefer our street raps over all that phony stuff out there? Because we're telling the real story of what it's like living in places like Compton. We're giving them reality. We're like reporters. We give them the truth.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

It's always hard for an artist from the U.K. to break into the United States. It's especially harder for a rapper because hip-hop is such an American art form.