When I was in N.W.A. and didn't get paid all the money I was owed, that's when the business side of showbiz hit me. I thought, "Half of this is workin'. I'm famous, but now I need to be famous with some money." That got my brain started at trying to figure out the business end. And once I figured out the business side, I next came to understand that success really comes down to the product, not to me, my personality, or what club I'm seen going into or coming out of. None of that matters.

The moral is that a career can be gone in an instant. And all you have in this world are the people you love.

Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren't about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.

Run DMC brought us out of that underground-only feel. They brought rap above ground and made it respectable as an art form to mainstream music.

Gangsta to us didn't have anything to do with Al Capone and stuff like that. It's just about living your life the way you want to live it. And you're not going to let nothing stop you.

If you born in the mud, you gonna be dirty, and people don't understand that.

People wanted to have fun more than they wanted to learn from their music, and that's where the shift started to happen.