Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.

To be honest, I didn't really get into making music to be an album artist.

I got asked to remix a lot of movie themes, like Mission Impossible, which other people ended up doing quite well. But it was just never my thing.

I'm trying to satirize what it's like to be a recording artist in 2011. I realize that standing on a soap box and ranting and raving about my opinions on the digital age and its effect on music is only going to get you so far.

Any good album title has multiple meanings, and I like choosing titles where I find myself repeating it, almost like a mantra.

I've said this a lot lately, too: if, 20 or 30 years down the road, when everything's said and done, I was never able to achieve that level of zeitgeist again, then so be it. I know how rare it is for anybody to do that. But I also feel like, OK, we're getting on to 25 years of putting out records: that's also kind of rare air for anybody who makes music. And I think you just end up kind of grateful for every opportunity that comes along.

I realized that people don't quite understand what I do when I was the new kid on the block and a lot of Hollywood was offering me fairly cheesy projects.