Nothing will ever top 'The Wire.' It was historical. It was black cinema.
What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
I think hip hop should be a living word. And what I mean by the living word is like yo, you gotta have the words that provide life.
Street's disciple, my raps are trifle. I shoot slugs from my brain just like a rifle.
I don't think hip-hop is a dying art form. I think it's impossible for hip-hop to be a dying art form.
There have been a lot of hip-hop artists who have made a difference to people's lives, spreading the message of the struggle and representing for those who have overcome adversity.
A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.
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.
The movies 'Dope' and 'Straight Outta Compton' blew me away. I love seeing directors and writers of color make amazing slices of pop culture.
I think hip-hop has changed. When I first came out, hip-hop was more of a kind of way to learn about new places, new things. What are kids doing on the East coast, what are kids doing here. Then it left that and is like a party mode. I think it's going back to people wanting to get messages and wanting to learn things from the music.
Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.
People need to understand that hip-hop that has gun talk is just for entertainment; similar to if you were watching a movie.
Music is so important. Because in Chicago it's up to us to tell the stories nobody else will.
There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.
