Never get involved with a business that you can't really be hands-on - that if your employees quit, you can't run yourself. If I can't cut hair, why open a barbershop?
Every ghetto you go to, Latinos and blacks are the two people that are together. We don't look at each other in any different way, like 'He's black; I'm Latino.' I look at us as one.
I would bump A Tribe Called Quest in my car all day.
The 'hood don't really wanna hear it, but you need brown rice, you need wheat bread, stuff like that.
There's two systems of health care: the one for the rich that's really good, then there's the one for the inner city, where they leave ladies in the emergency room unattended for 24 hours until they drop dead.
I think I'll die underrated, but it's alright, man.
I'm not just a rapper. I'm a child educator.
If you gay, you gay. Like, that's your preference, you know?
We gotta be proud to be Latino. It's almost like we cheating because we're American and we live by American customs, but at the same time, we got that Latino culture. We cheating; we double dipping.
I could battle rap forever, but it's a joke to me.
If I could gain 1,000 pounds and be healthy, I would love to do that.
After the success of my first album and the success of 'Flow Joe' kind of faded, I was struggling to make some money and make ends meet.
Being that I always perform, I started working out with a trainer to get that endurance and stamina. Now, I guess you could call me a gym rat.
As long as you get your education and you stay focused, you can do anything.
If you really analyze my music, there is a lot of violence in my music because the Bronx, at the era and time I was coming up, was almost equivalent to how a 'Braveheart' or 'Gladiator' movie would be.
Before I was rapping, I was always around the rap game, even though I was in the streets. I would be at all the parties and all the events, and I was pretty hard to miss. I was one of the few Spanish cats sitting there with jewelry on, Dapper Dan suits. It was pretty hard to miss me.
Whenever I come out with a hit record, they'll say, 'Ah, that's because of R. Kelly. Oh, it's because of Ashanti. Oh, he's lucky.'
KRS One and LL Cool J are the biggest influences in my rap career, along with Heavy D.
'Envy' was a bit of a challenge for me. It was smooth.
We're in the same ghettos, same inner cities, and we're suffering from the same problems. Every problem the blacks have, the Latinos have.
