the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.

I've always been inspired by a lot of work coming out of the UK

You change the beat up, you might change the way people dance to the music. If you change the way they move, maybe they'll think about it differently.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.