People are still tied to their hoods, and it's usually not the artist, it's usually the friends and instigators who get it popping.

I don't listen to nothing while I'm in the studio, because I don't want to be influenced by anybody else.

Everybody thinks the grass is greener on the other side. If you talk to most artists, they think they can play something, you know, "If I had stayed playing football in high school, if I had been doing basketball..." Everybody's got their fantasies and thinks the grass is greener. It's not. It's not.

I think hip-hop has changed. When I first came out, hip-hop was more of a kind of way to learn about new places, new things. What are kids doing on the East coast, what are kids doing here. Then it left that and is like a party mode. I think it's going back to people wanting to get messages and wanting to learn things from the music.

I still want to put together bigger and better programs to work with the community. I still think I could do better on that end.

I've been fighting my whole career to show a different side and prove naysayers - not prove them wrong, because I don't think you should get your energy from negative people.

While I had done the movies through Revolution Studios, we own the sitcom. It was a situation where, once the team was assembled, I knew we could create something really, really good.