You know, you'd hide behind a Public Enemy or Ice Cube, or Bruce Springsteen, or U2, because they spoke for you. But now everybody's bloggin'. I heard somebody say, "Blogging is just graffiti with punctuation." Everyone's an authority so there's nobody in power, 'cause everyone thinks they're in power.

Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.

Arnold Schwarzenegger blew away dozens of cops as the Terminator. But I don't hear anybody complaining about that.

There's a point where a cop pulls you out of that car and starts abusing you or beating on you and at that moment he is no longer within the law.

It's like they want to shut rappers down. They want to silence us. The Supreme Court says it's OK for a white man to burn a cross in public. But nobody wants a black man to write a record about a cop killer.

Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn't have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn't write it down on paper. He doesn't freestyle onto the track, it's all thought out.

You can't just sing the song and live another life.