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Rap is from the streets and I'm from the streets. That's why a lot of people accept me.

I just consider myself an artist. I don't really rap. I don't really sing. I just do what I feel is good, and people like it.

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.

If you have music that sounds like what you cover, people won't be able to differentiate who you are.

I look at rap as an opportunity to act. My head is full of different characters - in each song I'm auditioning a character.

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.

If you stay in one place, you can only rap about one thing because that's all you know.

The problem is that rap is so often a caricature of its own image. Nobody comes to the table with the seriousness of the effect that it can have; nobody is prepared for that.

The weird thing about rap is that you don't get compared in the same way that athletes do, even though it's probably the most competitive sport in music. In basketball, they look at a player and say: 'This guy was the best in his prime at this sport.' But in rap it's not until you're dead or retired that people think about it like that.