Transcription
Belief in oneself and knowing who you are, I mean, that's the foundation, but of everything great. People should learn from my mistakes as well, not only my successes. That's the beauty of living a life. I'm not a perfect guy. You can take whatever out of it that you choose that applies to you. Some things that I've done will not apply to you. And I mean, by the grace of God and whatever angels that I had over my shoulders, I made it through. You may not make it through that same hole, but if you could take what I've done and then perfect on it, then that's great.
We all aspire. We all have the same emotions, you know, no matter who you are, where you're from. We all have the same emotions, you know. We all want to be successful. We all have the same fears of failure. We all have these feelings of abandonment. We all want love. We have to stretch the audience, you know. It can't be a young man's game. It has to be a genre of music, you know. And what I do while recording this, I find the truth. Whatever truth that I'm going through, it's a real emotion. If I say I gotta learn to live with regrets, now I can relate that to that in my life. You can relate to that, you know, like everyone can relate to it. So I find a true emotion and connect to that emotion rather than try to make a certain type of record to make a kitty record. You got to understand the reason, right? Why does that guy think like that, right? How do you arrive at that point? You got to also look at that. You have to look at that. You got to look at the environments and places we live in and how things are set up and how things are structured and how we always last on the totem pole, even for my school into our roads, you know, everything that would that all obstacles that's placed in front of us. If this is what I have to live for, then I'm going to take the chance to get more.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happens to me. My first album, but I never really took it serious. It was more of a hobby. And it was such, it was such a gift to me, like it was a gift. Like it wasn't really hard for me to make, to create raps. It wasn't hard for me to write rhymes and things like that. This is when I used to write, like my earlier days. I used to write every day, every single day in the kitchen banging on the table. My mom's like, "Please get us a break back here." I'm at his green notebook. I should just write every single day. I wasn't writing with the intentions of having a record deal or anything like that. It was just something that I liked to do. It was more of a hobby. I wasn't really just trying to get a record deal. So I would run the streets after that, then I just stopped writing. So then I would still get all these ideas. I have all these ideas and I still make songs, but I now make any songs in my head. But so it still was a serious thing to me. To my man Jazz, it was also for Marcy. He got a record deal with EMI in a game's paper. It was like 300,000, like back then. This is like '88 or something. I'm like, correct. So it took a while. But when I really started getting serious, my first album came out '96 and it was like, and I had to put down by myself. Nobody would sign me though. I was terrible. Every single record I went to, every single record label, they was like, "This guy is terrible. He's nothing." I mean, like it went from singles like I would impress up singles, but in the car, I had to go to the record company, I mean, go to the record stores myself and yeah, take this, come back, get a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars, give them some more records. I mean, it really, it really started like that. Like I mean, but it made me appreciate it so much more. No one gave me anything. They didn't give me a record building. They didn't give me anything. Like I really just took my time and threw it step by step by step by step. And that goes from not listening to other people again, because I could have easily been like, "Wow, maybe I'm writing, but maybe what I'm talking about ain't right." You know what I'm saying? They said, "Everyone, no one wants to sign me." Maybe, maybe what I'm saying ain't right. I could have easily took that. That was easy. That would have stopped it suffering. But I didn't.
[Music]
Place, you know, like even the videos, you know, I don't want videos like music videos. Like each one is like a doc, or this is the short, or this is a, even the cartoon, uh, now we, uh, made for OJ. Like I wanted it to be just an honest portrayal of everything that I was saying. Like the story of OJ is about us moving forward. And for us to move forward, we have to take a look back. And we took a look back and say, "Okay, this is where we came from." And like, this is real images. These were shot by Warner Brothers and all these, uh, not the same with them out, bro. These were shot by major studios. Like these cartoons were on TV. This imagery were a pile. We were presented was this. And I wanted to draw a thread between that's really happening now. It's still happening. It's just not as overt. When you look at TV, you don't see a bad equal representation of people of color, you know. When business show on to use like this black shows on TV, or like that's a big deal. That should that should be an everyday occurrence because we are all like dynamic humans and creatures. And it's we haven't evolved past race. Still. And so it's like still [ __ ] like that's, you know, those points are like real important to me. You know, I think that, uh, of course, the, the headlines would be about being Kanye and things like that. But like this album has a lot of topics, you know, that's why I had to be so short. It's so convinced. It's so dense with subject matters and all these other things that if it was longer, you wouldn't be able to take it. It would like wear you out.
Never forget those true things that you stick to the basic things that make you successful. And for me, is that true finding that truth. Be true for the moment of where I am at the time, you know, not trying to cater to a certain demographic. I was around music my whole life. My mom and pop had like a huge record collection. So I started out listening to music early on. And I would just write music, you know, I just had a love from there. I didn't get to it, you know, I got caught into my neighborhood and my surroundings. But I've always taken it with me. I've always went back to it. And it just got to a point where it was like, make this decision. This is something you really love and you love to do. It's time to really focus on and to get serious about it and give it to all. And once I did that, it was no looking back from there. All my advice is to do things that are true to you. Most things that I'm involved with are extension of being creative, you know. Rockaway is a clothing company. It's part of who you are. And hip-hop is your attitude and what you're trying to express. How you dress. I love sports growing up. I grew up in a household where sports was on 24/7. So these all things that are comfortable for me, you know, these are things that I like. So I would just say get involved in things that you love. And also have a standard for yourself and have some sort of integrity. And try to, you know, find some sort of truth in what you're doing.
All the things that you apply in business, you know, they say that he has great instincts. But well, on the streets, having great instincts can be the difference between life and death, not just losing the deal or incarceration, you know, which is less than death. And being a person of high integrity, you know, people want to deal with you in business and trust and honorable a man of your word. All these things come to play in business world. I'm not condoning, uh, anything, any street activity. The way it is, it's not about who got more money and who got more house, you know, you've earned it. Buy what you want. But don't forget what's important. Without people and just being rich to be very boring. No one to share, you know, I mean, like you just be a rich person, one person on the planet, just like, well, then what do you do? Things don't happen to you, they happen for you. That's life. Everything is life. It happens for you. Everything is for your greatest good. You can't control the future. I mean, you could control it up to some point. You can't control what others do. You can't control anything. Someone can run a red light and that's the end of everything, you know. You only can control what you can control.
Saying things from other people's perspective and what other people are going through, you know, it helps me a lot. Was that somebody else that helped you get to that? Is that therapy? Is that group? Is that part of therapy? Part of being who I am, you know, but definitely a lot of, a lot of therapy. I'll be taught everything, but emotional intelligence, you know, that's not what you're taught as a young man growing up in projects. You taught to survive. I come from the school of making albums. I know right now, you know, everything being digital and everything being so fast and everything that, you know, separate and people, you know, I try to make albums cause for me, it's a capsule of time, you know, it's not just music for me, you know, you know, for me, it's where I was at this moment or what I'm trying to capture and what I'm trying to capture. The blueprint is, you know, what I call a new classic because it's influenced by the mob and gays and the generation before us, but it's not, uh, recreation of what they've done. My interpretation of it. And it's me making my mom is saying, "Here, this is what I want to be remembered as right here."
I think every move made, like we're gonna compare to chess. I think every move made is to be learned from, whether it was a good or a bad move. And I think it all sets you on a path. So in order for me to take back any of those moves, I would have to be unhappy with where I am now. And where I am now is, I couldn't even imagine in my wildest dreams that I would be here. So for me to take any of those moves back would be affecting the natural course of where I am now. So I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I mean, of course, there are things in life that you say, "I could have done differently." But knowing that and being aware of that, for me, it's helped me, you know. Every chess move that I've made, I was like, "Ah, he's gonna do that." It's like it was followed up because I learned from that one. Okay, now I have to change my strategy because, you know, I moved that there, he's going to move there. Now I have to move this over here. So at the end of the game, uh, you know, I believe I trapped the queen in the corner, to use a great analogy, and have the king in my side. So I'm pretty happy with where I am. That meant most to me. And always coming up, I always believed in the way you live your life, you affect the outcome of your life, you know, calm and everything. So I just want to be remembered as a very honest and straight up guy, you know. I'm pretty much a mirror. If someone's cool with me, like any cheese attract, right? You give off energy, you get that energy back. So just the person that was of the utmost integrity, you know, honest, very hard-working, and someone who really cared about the culture because at the end of the day, that's what I'm pushing everyone for. I always had that in the back of my mind. And then I got to a point where I was like, "Man."
[Music]
I don't want to ever just do it to do it. And then it was this opportunity. So those two things combining led to the retirement. And then, of course, the love for it. Like with anything else, the love for making music, you know, stop pulling me back to the studio. And it was like, "Yeah, for me, I was happy about it because I was like, yeah, that's the feeling I want." Go in with making an album on one, have something to say, feel like I need to do it, as opposed to it's November and, you know, putting out my that admiration. People look at me and say, "First black president." Right? Because for me, like I said, when I walk in the room, I represent the culture. I love the culture. And I love the honor it in that way. So when people look at me like that, it just gives me more motivation to keep, you know, to continue to open doors for that next generation of artists. Like I said, this is the thing that saved my life. Hip-hop. You know, I don't know where I would be without. There were no backup plans. So for me, it's very important. And when people recognize that, you know, it just lets me know that I'm doing the right thing.