I think there is going to be a whole market and we'll start to see hip-hop jewelry regularly in jewelry auctions around the world. Therefore, anybody who gets on the train early can only do well financially in the long run.

My alter ego does not look in too great a mood today.

Provenance is something very important in jewelry. You want to know who has worn a piece of jewelry and who it has belonged to - it's part of its history, part of its aura.

Critics are always complaining about the materialism of hip-hop and accusing the artists of living way above their means. But this ostentatious sort of spending isn't strictly the province of hip-hop. It's almost like a continuation of the American Dream.

I fell into hip-hop right from the beginning. I was a teenager in the '60s, so I was putting all my pocket money into buying LPs. I followed the ascent of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder. I followed popular music very closely, and I've never stopped.

I think there is going to be a whole market and we'll start to see hip-hop jewelry regularly in jewelry auctions around the world. Therefore, anybody who gets on the train early can only do well financially in the long run.

In the early '80s, I was blown away when I began to hear some of the earliest hip-hop songs, and I'm fascinated by all the permutations the genre has gone through.