I come from a very specific love of hip-hop. I'm saying hip-hop, not rap. That's what saved my life. I carry that badge with a lot of pride and honor, and I really enjoy trying to raise the perception and the bar of what we do.
The thing about the state of hip-hop is that people are too concerned. I don't think that there's a problem with being too concerned about videogames, especially for me, because I'm not in the industry. I'm just a consumer. But hip-hop is constantly like, "What are you doing for the scene?"
I honestly now know that I'm the physical embodiment of hip-hop on earth. That's my only purpose here on earth is to keep the culture together long enough for it to remain everything that we thought it could be when I was coming up.
I'm a small-time white kid trying to represent hip-hop. If a hip-hop artist comes up and beats me in a battle, who did they beat? A small-town white kid who ain't never been an MC, who ain't never done nothing. Now if an MC comes to battle and they get beat by a small-town white boy, that's MC suicide.
Record companies feel they are the culture. Hip-hop has to begin to define, protect, and promote itself, and that's why we founded the Temple.
That's a win for me, for people to be able to say, 'Faith, fatherhood, monogamy exists in hip-hop.'
I'm on the radio because I love hip-hop. I represent that community, but there are so many other aspects to who I am as a person.
I'm a fan of the mythos of Atlanta hip-hop, and it's something I grew up imagining. It was very interesting to get there and see the real version of this world and then reconcile the differences between what's presented as Atlanta hip-hop to the rest of the world and what the real, breathing version of it is.
Hip-hop has permeated pop culture for decades. For a long time, though, it seemed to permeate it in a such a way that it never really got its just due. Now, hip-hop seems to be getting that recognition and is more widely accepted, which is great.
I'm not saying that what the radio plays isn't good. My issue is with what they don't play. You can play Jay-Z, but why don't you play Jurassic 5? You can play Nas and Nelly, but why don't you play J-Live? I want to open up the door to how it was back in the day.
