For people who love Tribe, I'm the defector. They say, 'You should get back with Ali to do the beats.' But a lot of people don't realize I did all the music in Tribe. In the first three albums, I did all the beats!

I like music with soul and passion and the good of humanity. As long as it has those things, I'm all the way in.

I do try to speak of positive things. I still try to, like, present two sides of the story, and I do try to relate to life in a 360 degree and not be one-dimensional. But by all means, manage expectations.

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.

With the black male as a teenager, where you're coming from the ghettos and that kind of stuff, you've got to assert yourself, be macho, not let anybody walk over you, so that's where all this unnecessary bullshit comes from - from egos. That's why there are a lot of fights. That's how come the whole thing with rap has been violent. It's because of the male ego.

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.

We all have our own takes on things. To being yourself. The abstract, the whole thing that I play with, seems to result in seeing through your lenses, and once you express how you see things to others, you start to see there are similarities between all people. It's kind of like, no matter how far you go, you're still where you started, in a way.