Educate yourself make your world view bigger, visualize wealth, and put yourself in the picture

If we have power to degrade an entire society, then we also have the power to uplift it.

It's just hypocrisy on hip-hop's part to cry racial profiling when your race is on TV acting like fools.

Educate yourself make your world view bigger, visualize wealth, and put yourself in the picture

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.

I'm not an executive. I can do it, I have the mind for it, but there's a life that you have to lead, and you have to give up your creative freedom. That's what I don't want to give up.

I know that I'm freer as a hip-hopper than as an executive. Even as a black man, I enjoy more freedom as a hip-hopper than as a black man. That, s controversial to say, but it's the truth.