To Be Hip-hop Is Much More Than

I Think The Music Comes First, Then Comes The Fashion, And Thus, The Lifestyle. I Believe It Starts With Music, And Then The Person Delivering It Delivers The Lifestyle, The Fashion. Madonna Is A Great Example Of That.

I Hear A Lot Of Cries Of Socialism And Certainly Real Disguises Of "why Should I Share My Money With These People?" We Have To Get Back To "we." It's Important To Get Back To "we" Not Just "i."

I Was Born At A Very Crucial Time. I Consider 1968 To Be The Mason Dixon Line Between Pre- And Post-civil Rights Generation Ideas, Whereas A Lot Of People Born Before '68 They Kind Of Went Into That Moses Mentality. Like, I'm Not Going To Make It, You Know, I Don't Have Any Hope.

Resistance Here Doesn't Mean Revolution. It Doesn't Mean Storming The Barricades. Resistance Means Using Art For The Things That It Does Best, Which Is To Create Human Portraits And Communicate Ideas And Forge A Climate Where People Of Different Races Or Classes Are Known To You Because They Make Themselves Known. In The Simplest Terms, Art Humanizes. It Opens The Circuit Of Empathy. And Once That Process Happens, It's That Much Harder To Think Of People As Part Of A Policy Or A Statistic. Art Reverses The Alienation That Can Creep Into Society.

I'm Not One Of Those People Who's So Blinded By My Own Work And My Sweat. It's Kind Of Risky Writing A Memoir When You're Really Part Of A Larger Universe.