How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

I hear a lot of cries of socialism and certainly real disguises of "Why should I share my money with these people?" We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."

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.

Working with the artist elite can be like banging your head against the wall.

Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.

Half the time, my job is basically to talk people off the ledge. It's more psychological than just me picking up some sticks and counting, "1, 2, 3, 4."

For anyone that's ever had a musical breakthrough in their career, it's always followed by the departure period right after.