Being a father is the hardest job on the planet, because we don't have parental instincts like women have. You have to learn how to be a father before you even become a father, from a very young age. It's necessary to override what we're told in society a father should be, like if your son falls and scrapes his knee, you got to be tough. Baseball and all that are cool, but it's the tenderness and interactions that are really important. Boys are different; we have to impart that sensibility and that tenderness to them.

The normal kid can differentiate between various aspects of life, but a kid with dyslexia has to connect all those dots, and they have to link it like a chain. Teachers can't incorporate that. They don't have time; it's not their fault. They don't have the resources to give personal attention to each kid in the classroom.

So the only way I could stave off any of these assaults was to become a gang banger, and to excel, so I could quell the behavior. If I excelled, then I could call the shots. So I became a community leader from inside.

I let them [Kanye and Pharrell] be them; they let me be me. I'm just a little boy that does poetry whose friends got famous, and I like it that way. I like to be found. I don't want to be overexposed. I love when people discover me and discover my music.

I see myself as the oldest griot tradition of speaking to truth out here. There's a dark side that people don't even know is there.

They don't want art that might actually change the community. They just want consumers. They don't want people to manufacture things. They'll do the manufacturing, and they just need people to buy it, need youth to buy it.

I thought about ancient times when we didn't have electric light. People were slaves to the ebb and the flow of the light cycle. Good Morning and Good Night represents one light cycle.