Quote

Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth. People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you.

Hip-hop is all about impact, baby. You can sell records, you can be two-times platinum, you can be gold... but if you lame, you lame, man. We try to provide the exact opposite of that. It's style, individuality, confidence. We exude that.

A lot of times, when people say hip-hop, they don't know what they're talking about. They just think of the rappers. When you talk about hip-hop, you're talking about the whole culture and movement. You have to take the whole culture for what it is.

You can't compete with hip-hop. That doesn't mean I don't want to be as big as a rap star. I do - I'm always competitive. But there's this weird perception of me as someone who's sitting around plotting like a devil. It's not like that.

Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.

Hip-hop reflects the truth, and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It's a platform where we could offer information, but it's also an escape.

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.

However, people need to understand that it ain't that deep to try and convince people of what your persona is. You are who you are, and what you are will show in time. What you aren't can be hidden, but eventually it will come to light. Long story short: rappers should never take themselves too seriously.

I'm not saying that hip-hop needs gay rappers or anything, but they need to stop being so close-minded because that will just cause the genre to fail. Look at pop. Pop doesn't discriminate against people. Look at Lady Gaga, y'know what I mean?

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.