When you a young kid at that age at that time, and you know that you got talent as far as hip hop, you wanna be on the radio, that's the first thing. So we was more or less infatuated with just havin' a song on the radio, you know? Before our careers even launched it was more or less about lettin' everybody know, 'Staten Island? You got good emcees there.'
RaekwonI don't have one track that I consider better than the next because all I'm trying to do is still grow as an artist.
RaekwonBefore I think we was emcees, we was more or less narrators too. Because if you look at the early '80s hip hop, it was so much creativity goin' on with artists like then, like Slick Rick, then you had Rakim, and you had these different kind of artists back then. And we was a marble cake of all these artists. So I didn't have a problem with writin' stories because I felt like that was somethin' I loved to do. Even to this day, I really consider myself an entertainer-slash-narrator. I like to talk about stuff that goes on.
RaekwonBut 'Cuban Linx' was a project that really needed to come, and I really wanted to get it off my chest because I know that the fans were really skeptical about it, like 'is this really gonna be what it's supposed to be?' So once everybody caught it for what it was and everybody was happy, that's mission accomplished for me.
Raekwon