When it comes to Baltimore I want to say that it's actually a lot worse than what you see in 'The Wire.'
I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.
Thug Life to me is dead.
I grew up in Washington, D.C. Suffice to say, it was not a garden spot.
The 1980s were tough for most of Britain, but nowhere more so than Tottenham.
I know Chicago cops. They're tough. They have to be. The whole city would explode. It's like a bomb, Chicago.
Where I lived in Glasgow looked like Dresden after the war. It was a bomb site. I don't think I'd ever played football on grass until I moved to Australia.
The single 'Tha Block Is Hot' was a song that was true to life.
Sometimes I do feel hopeless when I look out and scream out through my music, and I scream out through these interviews, and I scream out to people to kind of get their attention back on the things that are meaningful. There's people dying on the streets of Chicago - young people, young men and women who are losing their lives.
New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.
If the truth be known, we are on the verge of losing an entire generation of our young people, killing and dying in the streets of America.
I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago 's South Side.
The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing, and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it - they all look like Chief Keef. When it comes to the point that, you know, that kids who are doing the killings, and they're kids 13 to 19 years old, and you can replicate that in New Orleans, you can replicate that in Oakland. All the kids look the same.
I'm an inner city man, born and bred.
It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.
Baltimore and Detroit - they are solid cities.
If you're reaching for a local reference to drop for a place that is typical of everything wrong with Britain, you would switch between Croydon or Bromley. There is a lot of deprivation there, but it's not one of the poorest parts of the country.
Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.
The senior legislator of the state commented on the state's largest city:
I grew up in the city of Detroit, where things were just bad.
We moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1979, when I was five. The funny thing is that, even though Baltimore had one of the top murder rates in the country in those days, I grew up hearing about how dangerous New York was.
I grew up in Baltimore.