I don't mind payin' for the police and for streets and sanitation, or road work, bridges, trains, food subsidies and welfare. But I don't wanna pay for bombs to fight proxy wars in the middle of nowhere against enemies in the night.

I always say that you define what success is to yourself.

I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence

You can't control it once you turn it into the label, so there's the expectation that it'll leak a week before the album comes out. That's the world we live in.

That should be the measure of success for everyone. It's not money, it's not fame, it's not celebrity; my index of success is happiness.

Success is a very dangerous thing and I think we have to be very careful about when we dictate what success is for somebody else. Because you don't know what it's like.

In Chicago, you have an absence of strong family units, and that absence gets filled by gangs. You have a failure in the school system, after-school programs and other social programs to help keep kids off the streets. Amnesty International speaks to that in some way, by keeping these issues in the forefront.