There are a lot of music startups that don't have anything to do with anyone's love for music. It has to do with them having a glorious IPO and then retiring to the Bahamas somewhere. It's important to keep that in mind.

I would agree with you that there's 90% imitation and 10% innovation. That's true of any genre.

It's satisfying to put out new music. And I think that's the context in which I'm comfortable revisiting things from the past.

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.

I've been on a major label for 14 years. I've always wanted as many people as possible to hear my music, and it definitely made sense for the majority of my career to be on a major label, on a distribution level, to be in people's faces and be out there, and have access to major labels' incredible machine, even though they have not understood or haven't been invested in what I was doing.

People love drama, and if you aren't really interested in perpetuating that, it keeps you from exploding on a mainstream stage. I'm totally fine with that.

The story I always recite - and have had to recite so many times over the years to different lawyers and different people within Universal - is that the business end of Mo'Wax was basically, like, 'Give us the big ones samples first, and we'll see how we get on.' And I gave them the six or seven that were, to me, the ones that were the scariest, and the biggest use. It wasn't about the big names, necessarily - although that played into it a bit, with people like Bjork and Metallica.