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To be a white kid into hip-hop meant you'd sought it out and you practiced the art. Which meant dedication and diligence, as well as removing yourself at least occasionally from your own comfort zone and circumstances, and from people who looked like you.

In every interview I've got to explain something about being white but still being into hip hop. It's gone way beyond the musical aspect of the business. And I'm as critical about music as everybody else is.

I see myself as a hip-hop artist, but I never wanted to make music for a specifically white audience. That's not what I grew up around.

As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.

Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

I always thought that there was something in hip-hop culture that was the misfit of all the musical styles, where they didn't really belong. They're kind of like, 'No, we're a real culture! We're not going anywhere, you can't get rid of us!' I really liked that there was a rebelliousness about it. I connected with that.

You don't have to be a certain thing to be cool. If you're white, you don't have to act black or whatever. Just be you and know who you are.

Sometimes you have the trends that's not that cool. You may have certain artists portraying these trends and don't really have that lifestyle, and then it gives off the wrong thing. And it becomes kinda corny after awhile. It's really about keeping hip-hop original and pushing away the corniness in it.

When I was growing up, hip-hop was still a pretty specialised thing.