Me and Kendrick Lamar have had conversations for years back and forth, so that's my dude.
Being an outspoken Christian in the music industry means always feeling out of place. It's like whatever you have accomplished is less credible because of your faith.
I'm not afraid of people; I'm afraid of not doing what God created me to do.
History doesn't give credence for resorting to violence to have your voice heard.
I think of people like Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes. They all came out of the South, and they followed a certain tradition and energy. That's no knock to groups like The Temptations or The Supremes, not at all, but they were way more polished in how they did things.
I've done songs with legends like De La Soul with Pete Rock. I've done songs with B.O.B. I've done songs with Big Kit.
Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.
In Scripture, when something is repeated, especially a name, it shows an emotional connection, a deeper sense of meaning.
I thought that God and rap would never work. I thought that God wasn't okay with rap. People knew I used to rap, and I went to the Bible studies. Someone said, 'Hey, you should rap about Jesus.'
I'm in a very comfortable place, and some of that comes from the shackles of not having to be what people want you to be.
No matter how bad you mess up, God loves you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
My mother was a - she worked at a halfway house. And one of the former inmates slid me a mix-tape full of different hip-hop songs. And so that was my first kind of experience with rap music.
I love Lauryn Hill when she first came out with her solo project because it felt like she just knew what she was doing.
Honestly, what Jesus was about was laying his life down for the marginalized who didn't have it all together.
I'm digesting C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller and so on and so forth, Francis Schaeffer. I'm seeing how they've affected culture and politics and science and so on and so forth, with implicit faith versus explicit faith.
My views as a Christian means there's a moral plumb line that I'm fighting to adhere to.
As children, we look up to people, for better or worse, and see them as the standard for how we should act and identify ourselves.
People who've only seen me perform might assume that I'm confident and that being ignored wouldn't bother me - but it does.
I live in Atlanta because Ludacris lives in Atlanta. And because T.I. lives in Atlanta and because Lil Wayne comes to Atlanta to hang out all the time and because Rick Ross' engineers are in Atlanta.
I think complexity is beautiful.
