It's not just a struggle for blacks to be accepted by whites, but the other way around as well. A lot of people don't see that.

I'm a cinephile. I love movies, I love film at every level. I'm a student of it. It informs me as does all art in my music, because there's stories, there's acts, there's moods, there's dynamics, there's moodiness, emotion. All of those things that play into a film. I think that could equally be said about music. It definitely informs me. Beats is stories.

When I watch films now, theres more of a musicality to the way the film are written.

For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.

Predating the Internet and predating videos, you had an active imagination. You would hear sounds and then get mental pictures of what these sounds felt like to you. It engaged you and made you more invested in it. It made you want to get tickets to the show, buy the album, put the poster on the wall. Now it's sensory overload.

To be honest I'm not going to sell dreams like everybody else does and say, "Sure, it can be changed." I don't want to seem like a pessimist, but nothing's getting better.

One thing the music industry has taught me is to manage my expectations.