No Idea Is Original, There's Nothing New

I Want You To Know Who I Am: What The Streets Taste Like, Feel Like, Smell Like. What The Cops Talk Like, Walk Like, Think Like. What Crackheads Do - I Wanted You To Smell It, Feel It. It Was Important To Me That I Told The Story That Way Because I Thought That It Wouldn't Be Told If I Didn't Tell It.

People Have Stopped Battling In Hip Hop, In The Primitive Sense, And The Focus Of The Competitive Element Has Shifted To The Music. It's Less About Bragging And More About Being The Best Lyrically And Poetically.

My First Record - It Was 1991. I Was 16 Years Old. My First Album Came Out When I Was 20. So, I've Been Here That Long And I Still Have The Passion To Do It.

When I Made Illmatic, I Was Trying To Make The Perfect Album. It Comes From The Days Of Wild Style. I Was Trying To Make You Experience My Life. I Wanted You To Look At Hip-hop Differently. I Wanted You To Feel That Hip-hop Was Changing And Becoming Something More Real.

Mostly Every Form Of American Music Is Dead. It's Been Dead. R&b Isn't Really Good. You Got A Handful Of Great Guys - Ne-yo, R. Kelly, Usher. You Have A Handful Of Great Female Artists. But For The Most Part The Music World's Changing And Change Is Good. You Have To Make Adjustments If You Want To Survive In That World. You Start To Thinking About Creative Moments - Bliss. When Everything Was All Good. You Realize That In Comparison To The Way Hip-hop Started Off, Where We Should Be At Right Now Is Not There.