Being an adult, you've already suffered enough from your own mistakes, and the world, to come to this as a humble human being. So it's not like, "I'm going to do the right thing because it advances me," as much as it's like, "I'm going to do the right thing because this puts me closest to the dream I had as a 10-year-old kid."

When you talking about funk music you just talking about a collage of a lot of different types of music. They used strings, they had brass, they had vocalist.

I learned to fly planes at fifteen years old because one of my teachers thought I'd be a better pilot than rapper.

I would just encourage everybody to just talk your opinion more, allow other people and fight for other people to [express theirs].

Most rappers are black men. If you're a black man, you owe something to the community that you came from. If you're rapping about the community that you came from, and you're romanticizing parts of it for the entertainment of people who don't look like you, you certainly owe something to the community.

I don't think I'm more politically-based as much as socially-based. My grandmother died on February 29th, and she kept all of my magazine and newspaper scraps, every interview. I've been in the newspapers since I was about 15 - not for rapping, but for real substantive stuff I was doing in the community, organizing around gang violence in the schools. So I had already made my grandma proud before I was on TV. I've always been who I am.

As entertainers, you're afraid [about] loss of income - but if other people start going to jail for free speech, then we've lost this great thing that America is, and I'd like to keep that.