Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.

No one likes to be treated like people in minority communities. What it's saying is that because you're poor, because you live in a neighborhood that deals with oppressed conditions, you deserve to be treated like a criminal. In our Constitution it says you have the right to live without illegal search and seizure.

Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build

I feel like people mislead themselves when they tell themselves they're into me because of the lyrics. From my vantage point, people aren't into me because of the content, because of the lyrics. Because there's a million of rappers who have great content.

What's more condescending and corny than someone telling you how much more money they have than you and telling you basically, 'I don't care about poor people,' which is a large part of what you hear of corporate hip-hop on the radio.

By the time you get into other kinds of music - R&B, country, or whatever - it becomes something that's romantic. It becomes something unattainable. Never-ending undying love. And in hip hop, we're still taking direct inspiration.

Harry Belafonte hit me to the Dream Defenders and I liked what they were about. When I asked them how I could help their movement, they said, "You can help by coming down here; you can tweet."