After 2001, everyone in the Soulquarians blew up, which wasn't expected. We all got the success, and then everybody froze.

I've come to the conclusion that the average person can do about four things a day, like four real things a day.

I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.

I've always been a lover of hoodies. I'm a guy that travels a lot. I'm a guy that spends a lot of time on a cold air-conditioned tour bus. I'm a guy that likes to watch movies in peace. I'm a guy that likes to travel in the airport in peace.

According to my parents, I just started drumming when I was two. I traveled with them from five to seven on the road, playing percussion. Between 8 and 12, my dad sort of prepared me by teaching me every aspect of road life.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.