Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So much of my life and my style and sensibility are influenced by skateboarding. It's counter-culture and skateboarding is my introduction to counter-culture.
I'm not motivated by money or fame. I'm more driven by the electricity of creativity. The idea of being one of the legends that inspired me, being like Tupac.
I wanted to go to a place with my first album that was just to the root, to the heart of emotion, and just unbridled by anything that wasn't truly in my heart.
I just love The Cure. I think that their songwriting is so next level, and I really like the juxtaposition between this bad boy attitude and a softer, more emotional idea.
You know, I think the idea of activism, more so a revolutionary mindset, is something that has been with me for most of my life, especially since I was about 16 years old.
I'd been doing my own thing, and making my own money; I wasn't built by a record label or the music industry, nor was I built by prominent artists that have given me co-signs.
You can live an entire lifetime in Chicago and not hear a gunshot, but if you go in a certain neighborhood then you can live your whole lifetime hearing gunshots all the time.
I came from a two-parent household and my father is a PhD from west Africa, but at the same time I grew up five blocks from where Obama lived and five blocks from the projects.
You can go into a psychiatrist sometimes and just feel that this person's only role and their only desire is to write you a prescription, get a check and send you out the door.
Anybody who's dealt with addiction and depression knows that sometimes they can make you forget who you are and kind of bring out a different person, somebody you don't know as well.
I just stand by the things I believe in and if that upsets people, which it often does, then we got a situation on our hands. Everybody is okay and safe. I'm just blessed to be awake.
Service is key. And as I have more on my plate, and I have more ambitions and more goals and things I want for myself, I'm realizing more and more how important it is to be a servant.
I've been combing through the Wolverine archives and advertisements from the sixties and seventies. I'm looking to take inspiration from designs of the past and bring them into the future.
I'd be on stage in Ireland performing for thousands of people and just not believing in what I'm doing at all. And it hurt, it hurt badly. I knew every day that I couldn't continue this way.
No I.D. helped me to just identify certain energies that I might not have really represented yet in the music that he picked up on just in my personality, or in the person he perceived me to be.
I don't love America; I love people and places in America. How could I truly love an entity that views me as subhuman, that wrote in its constitution for me to be considered three-fifths of a person?
It's anxiety that led to a depression that I've been dealing with since I was 16, 17. That was the first time I was ever prescribed medication for either of those disorders I guess you would call it.
LA is the only place where people know my name and still walk up to me and ask it. And I think that was really representative of a lot of the transplant people in LA. I just found everything so phoney.
I think that everybody has their own interpretations of what it means to be American. But from my vantage point, being black and successful in the Unites States of America is the epitome of being American.
Chicago, I feel, is a microcosm for the segregated, violent environment that is America. I try to not only speak about these things in music, but also try to address these things in real life tangibly with action.
I like the story about Bon Iver. They said he kept his GRAMMY in, like, the basement bathroom so he could just focus on getting another one. If I won a GRAMMY, I'd probably keep it at my mom's house on 47th Street.
But I think your biggest crime as a citizen of society or America or the world is to be ignorant by choice. There's no excuse for that. I feel, when the information is at my fingertips, I could never choose to be ignorant.
I have a responsibility to my fellow my community, to my fellow man, and woman. With that said, I create from a place of selfishness, but I'm also cognizant of potential impact on others. And I try to make that impact positive.
And being that my father is gone in immigrant and I have you know - that I owe my existence to immigration, I think that the fear of immigration that has existed in American history from the first day, I just find it to be wrong.
My foundation mainly works in Chicago, and the city needs a lot of help. I'm glad that was able to be incorporated into what I'm doing with Wolverine. It's important to keep one foot firmly planted at home and try to benefit my people well.
That's something I can never lose: my love for the art of rap. As I grew older and became more interested in song writing, it just pushed my possibilities further. I always have to have a foot firmly on the floor as a rapper, because that's how I started.
The disparity between the haves and have-nots was always blatantly obvious to me, and it's that exact gap that drove me to start writing and pick up a pen. I wanted to explain and understand the world around me because it was easy to see it was corrupted.
Because many people deny the Palestinian struggle. They deny them everything. They deny them humanity, they deny them the right to be on the land they were born in. They deny them the right to return to the homes that were stolen from them, to build Israel.
I can remember being a young kid, twelve, thirteen years old just with my headphones on, on the train, listening to rappers paint these vivid pictures. Listening to Mobb Deep and feeling like I was in Queensbridge even though I'm on the Southside of Chicago.
No I.D. is like an alchemist and he'll only give you so much at one time. It's for the best at the end of the day, cause through the process of working with No I.D. I was able to soak up his perspective for songwriting and production and keeping music alive.
I'm inspired by Prince on every level; the whole androgynous thing, the ambiguity in his gender and his foundation - it's amazing. That's the way I think about clothes, in relation to my personality and my life. It's just an extension of who I am, like a song.
Traffic' was an album that had a significant amount of songs. It was not complete and I felt didn't fully represent me as a person or as the artist I want to be and so when I started the writing process for 'The Autobiography' I was really turning a corner in my life.
We've got a lot of love from Chicago, you know we've been selling out big venues in Chicago that other people don't sell out. Our music is something that's a bit different you know from what's being publicized and that's going against everything else coming out in Chicago.
Being someone that grew up in a biracial household I never really felt accepted by black people when I was a little kid, I didn't feel fully accepted by black kids and I definitely didn't feel fully accepted by white kids cause I just felt like I could never be neither one.
I never look at it as if any of my successes were given to me through fate. Getting record deals, making the songs I've made, having fans and working with the people I work with aren't chance. I know that dedication and work have gotten me to where I am and will get me to where I wanna go.
So whether that's taking a bunch of people from Chicago down to Standing Rock or being in Flint, Michigan, or being in Palestine or Baton Rouge after Alton Sterling's killing, I've been trying to, just as a man, be present and stand with the struggling and oppressed people around the world.
A lot of the most prolific painters died broke and weren't appreciated in their time. I'm trying to remember who exactly I was thinking of - like Rembrandt, van Gogh or Gauguin. Some of those guys, they got whole floors of museums to themselves but weren't really appreciated in their time at all.
I collaborated with so many people from Chicago - so many Black people, young Black women organizations like BYP100 and Assata's Daughters. Just being out there, I saw what a community mobilizing can accomplish in terms of freedom and how music and my words in my music can play a significant part in that.
My body is what? Like 99 percent water or something. But I drink all of my water out of, like, plastic containers. You know what I mean? What is plastic? My body is not one percent plastic, but the way that I ingest the water that runs through all of my veins is almost strictly out of plastic. There's something wrong with that.