Everything right now tends to be the same and very aggressive, and I think people are getting a little burned out on it.

I still consider myself a consumer of music more than anything else.

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 remember when the big shift happened in 1996-97, when suddenly it dawned on the music community: 'We should license our music to commercials and sell out for all intents and purposes. It doesn't really matter.'

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.

I would much rather people kick and scream and tear their hair out and accuse me of all kinds of blasphemy, than just have no opinion whatsoever.

I saw. I wanted to start my own store so people would know that what they were buying was real. There were bootlegs around at the time that had my name on the cover, but the music had nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to compare myself to [Jimmie] Hendrix, but back in the '70s, there were some Hendrix bootlegs.