You can't expect to be on MTV and critique George Bush. You can't expect to be on BET or the cover of 'The Source' advocating Jesus Christ or Buddha or Hindu Krishna or Moses. As a conscious rap artist, you have to play in the arena that you're supposed to be in. What is that arena? That arena is the college market. The conscious rap artist woos the college market, even though the college market is the wildest, most sexed-out, drug-driven market in the country, possibly the world.

Hip-Hop is being spoken through spirituality... Meaning that you'll be able to listen to it spiritually for yourself.

You are not doing hip hop; you ARE hip hop.

Don't you think it's time we thought about the future? Whether our children are gonna be winners or losers

No [other rappers are on my level], none of them. Here, let me put it like this in the sky, there are a million stars, but when the sun appears, you see none of them. I am the sun.

I think that all journalists, specifically print journalists, have a responsibility to educate the public. When you handle a culture's intellectual property, like journalists do, you have a responsibility not to tear it down, but to raise it up. The depiction of rap and of hip-hop culture in the media is one that needs more of a responsible approach from journalists. We need more 30-year-old journalists. We need more journalists who have children, who have families and wives or husbands, those kinds of journalists. And then you'll get a different depiction of hip-hop and rap music.

I used to let the olde english 8- suds bubble in the last car of the Franklin Avenue shuttle