I don't really get the same kinda romance that I would get from, like, jazz. And even to a lesser extent to rock 'n roll. Rock 'n roll has a romance to it - how can I put it? A very vulgar romance, but still a romance; whereas hip hop has more facade.

It's really about taking something inherently negative, and starting with the word loser, starting with something that's negative, and changing it into something that's positive, redefining it, but doing it in a certain way, how - like I would say when I look out at the world and you see it's dark and it's just overbearing and every day is depressed, depressed, depressed. What it took was to change my perspective a little bit. Not to change the world, to change my perspective.

My mother and my father taught me to look at the actual problem, not the face of it, not the veneer of it. So for me, I was never - I was impressed that it - racially, I was impressed, right, but now in America it's about economics, and it's been about economics, and honestly, everything's been about economics since I don't want to say the beginning of time, but it's been about economics for a long while.

Everybody has their opinion on what's 'real,' and what's they choose to listen to and their personal preference. Whether they're 2 years old or 200 years old. And people can listen to whatever they want.

I think there's a lot of the hip-hop crowd behind Barack Obama because he's a black man. Honestly, I'm rooting for Hillary because race is only going to go so far. All the presidents are men at the end of the day.

Sometimes I wish I never found the Internet. Sometimes I regret getting a laptop and Wi-Fi for logging into the Internet because it is such a distraction. If you have any addictive personality, the Internet will magnify it.

It's a funny line when you're walking - the creativity, the subjectivity versus the objectivity, creativity versus the business, and recognizing that you are in the music business, so there are certain things that you have to acquiesce to on the business side and certain creative decisions that you have to make for the purposes of serving the business side of it.