You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box.

McDonald's offers a king's ransom to any hip-hop artist who is able to put Big Mac into a song. MTV - and more to the point, Viacom - is succeeding in extending a teenage life to twenty-nine or even thirty-one years old. It is about extending this market and removing any intelligent substance in the music.

Nothing has more words and performance than rap music.

When we worked on Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted album. Before we talked studios, beats, or lyrics, I said, "Two rules: Only say what you're able to vouch for. Number two, never repeat yourself twice, because we makin' an album that people will play over and over.

You know, I've written many of my songs while driving - which is against the law in many cases.

Maybe we need to look upon technologies and social networks as things that come out of us, not things that lead us. We can be on top of these things instead of them bein' on top of us as human beings.

Eminem has talent, and his talent is the thing that influences many young people who would have never gone anywhere near rap. White kids in different parts of the world use him as a barometer and the standard to live up to. In some ways, Eminem is an artist who has ushered in a new movement.