Hip-hop is too young to put a definition on it

Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?

It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.

I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people - eavesdropping, basically. I'm vulnerable to all of it.

It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.