Hip-Hop went from selling crack to smoking it
My influences, going back through the history of rap, talk about Doug E. Fresh, Kool Moe D, Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy.
I think that people have been claiming hip-hop as being dead since the moment it started.
I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships.
Rap now is multi-generational, which has its own issues. My son is a big Cudi fan, but he does not like talking to me about Kid Cudi.
When I started getting into West Coast rap - The Game, then I started studying a lot of Tupac Shakur and watching his interviews.
Once upon a time Americans didn't want to listen to Canadian rap and now Drake's the biggest rapper in the world.
People are taking a second look at Compton or rethinking what they believed to be true. Even the rap stars who helped established Compton's reputation worldwide are older now, and even their images have evolved.
I was heavily influenced by Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, Grandmaster Caz, but I kind of wanted to take it somewhere else.
Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time. It was a time of heightened rightwing politics, so the climate dictated the direction of the group.
Rap music and rap records used to always be like this: we get one or two shots to a piece cause it was a singles marketplace and when the major record companies saw that it could also handle the sales of the albums then they started to force everybody to expand their topics from 1 to about 10 and you gotta deliver 12 songs, so a lot of times if you took a person who wasn't really developed, and the diversity of trying say 12 different things, you know the companies were like "Cool! Say the same thing 12 different ways."
By the late '80s, I was already giving up on rap music.
