Today, a young person that doesn't know themselves will totally be sold some other situation. Let's do your avatar. You know? And young people are going out, spending what little they have to try to buy themselves when they don't have themselves, or they feel like they don't have themselves. To me, that's like a damn pimp tragedy.

I think the problem for the future generations is a lot of people ain't takin' the time to look for them and give them their voice, so therefore for their voice to be heard, they gotta bang more pots on the ceiling, so to speak; they gotta do crazy things just to get recognized. I just feel that whenever you don't give a generation some kind of voice, then expect side effects.

A lot of artists have been persuaded into doing whatever they can do to gain attention. The media, of course, will position and promote the worst of them to the front page. The sidewalk to crime becomes the marketing campaign. These artists have seen it work and sell millions and millions of records for other artists.

If you have no soul you can gut it out. You know, like a marionette, you'll just follow what seems to actually give you whatever you ain't got.

I adhere to the philosophy, "I don't care who writes the laws, let me write the songs."

You're always going to sound like yourself, but you can make really strong attempts to keep some similarities, but move away from what you did before for popularity's sake.

I always remain optimistic.