As the voices beneath the music are talking, you find that the music is just as important as what they're saying. The traditional thing is to lower the music so you can hear the dialogue. We just couldn't do that for that song.

As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated.

There's a similarity in both being young people who are not about the politics of respectability.

You can't imagine hip-hop without the Black Panthers. Today, hopefully, the movement can be an inspiration to people. These were people who made mistakes but they were trying to change things.

Race is always tossed into the mix. The unspoken idea is always that white people have a right to carry guns and bear arms.

I want to be able to tell black people something they don't know, something about our own lives.

When black men started bearing arms, these people who we think of as being pro-gun are saying, 'We ought to change this law.