Outside of rap what artists or albums are you currently listening to? [James Blake and some Gonj..I can't spell it, so]

I always think of that Public Enemy song, "Night Of The Living Baseheads". At night, it was like zombies walking around, very dangerous. A lot of money was being made by black kids and they was fighting over that money and then they had Uzis. Can you imagine?

Nas made Illmatic [1994] when he was 19, which was an incredible accomplishment—I can’t even understand it.

That’s intriguing to me. Like, when Lauryn Hill got pregnant, and she wrote that line “they said, Lauryn, baby, use your head/but instead I chose to use my heart” [from “To Zion” off The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 1998], I thought that was just such a powerful time for her. That was like a crossroads for her—like, people must have been telling her, “What are you gonna do? You’re gonna put your career in jeopardy if you have this baby.” But she just made the decision to have her kid, and she was talking about it on this record.