I don't sing white; I don't sing black - I sing Bronx. When I sing 'Ruby Baby,' I'm rolling like Jimmy Reed. I wanted to communicate like Hank Williams and groove like Jimmy Reed.
Oh man, I love what the South brings as far as the soul, and I really have noticed from even the early days of listening to OutKast and Goodie Mob that Atlanta and the South has a diverse sound to it. You have bounce music. You have soulful musicians. You have artists with vocals who try to do different things.
With me being form the South, I wanted to make this album like a G Unit.
When I came out with 'Posse on Broadway,' I decided, enough with trying to imitate New York, enough with trying to imitate L.A., let's just be Seattle. And rock, grunge, followed right after 'Posse on Broadway' and Seattle just exploded.
I started producing in California, and they called it mob music. When I moved to Atlanta, the sound was different. People in Atlanta didn't like to rap over West Coast beats. So I had to make adjustments to what was going on in the South.
The thing is that when I'm making music, I'm not really chasing that sound - the Atlanta sound that we hear a lot.
Every single place that's brushed upon me has made me the artist that I am - from Nigerian Highlife music and the vocal melodies that I grew up on when I would be sitting with my father and his fellow chiefs, to the funk and freeness of the Bay Area groove, to L.A.'s smooth G-funk legacy, Brooklyn's lyricism, and now Atlanta's trap history.
Randomly enough, all of my favorite rappers growing up were East Coast rappers. I don't know. I just related to them a little more at first - because if you're born in L.A., and you lived there your whole life, Snoop Dogg literally sounds like cars driving by. You feel me? You hear Snoop Dogg so much.
For all its reverb and defiant noise, the sound of Black Tambourine barely reached past the borders of Washington, D.C., in the early '90s.
My style is a very universal sound, which is very close to where I grew up.
When I started to make music at the end of the '90s, I saw myself highly influenced by hip-hop and techno, but I wanted to apply these ideas to something from the local sound; something that had identity, that would say who we were and where we came from.
That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds.
I try to do records sometimes that have a different bounce - maybe it's a Southern bounce or something.
