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Rap is just somebody getting something off his chest. That's all it is.

I've never been a rap guy, I don't really know that much about rap music, to be honest. I like it, but I think what really happened was just my music seems to work so well with rap music.

So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white - everybody.

Rap was started by black people and, thus, is at the foundation of black culture. So people cannot always wrap their minds around someone like me being inspired by it. But if you listen to the things we're saying, they're authentically us.

I don't feel that rap has been respected as an art form. Because people have seen rappers rap off the top of their heads, they don't think it is difficult.

To me, rap music is bigger than who's the coolest rapper, the biggest rapper. It's everything about your personality.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

When you've been raised in care, rap music isn't just about guns and sexism. They're talking about real things you can hang on to, problems of identity that you have sympathy with. It's not just about the music, with rap: when I was in care, it meant a whole lot more than that.

I think the problem with people, as they start to mature, they say, 'Rap is a young man's game,' and they keep trying to make young songs. But you don't know the slang - it changes every day, and you're just visiting. So you're trying to be something you're not, and the audience doesn't buy into that.

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.