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Despite what people think of cowboys, they take pride in how they look, and that look is important to them.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

It's a fact that kids watch TV. But if you think back, when you watched cowboy movies, you would go out and play cowboys. TV and movies motivate people.

If you were black, you experienced prejudice. It wasn't a real horrible thing for us; we went through it. We noticed it mostly in the South and in Las Vegas, where we couldn't stay in the hotels where we entertained. But that began to change.

I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.

I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it.

The first thing that pops into my mind when it comes to playing cowboys is my father, Lloyd Bridges. When I was a little kid, I loved to dress up like a cowboy - put on the boots, hat, and walk around. He was in a lot of westerns, and my dad loved to ride.

I can tell you from personal experience it gets a little tiring having to make the rounds on cable shows to explain 'what's up with black folks.'

I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.