I don't feel comfortable making empty music.
Why give you the cure when the disease makes money?
Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
If you go to a college campus and you do stop and frisk, you're going to find a lot of drugs there too.
Hip hop is at its essence a folk music, because it speaks the language that people are still speaking at ground zero, it speaks the language that people speak on the streets.
I think all those artists are artists who are appreciated because you believe their words and you appreciate their honesty in their music. If you don't appreciate the honesty in the music, the beat can be fly as hell but you'll never give an emcee props.