With 'Hip-Hop Saved My Life,' I attempted to make 'Kick, Push,' but for rappers. To give a real basic play-by-play of the life of a rapper before he makes it - if he ever makes it, because you can get stuck in that and be trying to make it for the rest of your life.

Barack is at a level where he can't - no matter how much he wants to or how much we want him to - he's not going to come take out our garbage, so to speak. He can't be the garbage man and the president. He can't be the mayor and the alderman. He can't fill all those roles. So I always push for local, local activity on the political scene.

I don't like to hear myself sing. So to get comfortable hearing myself sing, I sang in another accent.

I trust people to be human. Sometimes you do things that make amazing amounts of sense; sometimes you do things that don't make any sense whatsoever.

I'm not in competition with nobody. I want to make good music for my fans who want it, who enjoy it, who learn something from it. And that's what it is.

My approach is I put God first; I say "God willing" all the time. The only way things will change is with God. So knowing that I can't really change anything, I'm just going to satire it.

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.