I navigate different cultures daily, and I understand how people can make false assumptions because of their lack of interaction with the cultures I find myself in. But if they don't frequent these spaces much, how can they rush to judgment?
Moving forward, hopefully the platform my career has given me will allow me to continue to be a voice in culture, whether that's doing lectures on campus or writing books or whatever that looks like. I feel like that's really the lane that I uniquely connect with.
Atlanta, to me, has the sauce as far as urban music is concerned.
I function, I live life as a Christian, and me living life as a Christian doesn't mean I'm a sanitized person. It means that I readily admit I'm a jacked up person, and I need a savior.
My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance - at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.
Christians have no idea how to deal with art.
Christianity is the truth about everything. If you say you have a Christian worldview, that means you see the world through that lens - not just how people get saved and what to stay away from.
Hang out with me long enough, and I'm bound to let you down.
I consider what I do soul music. It's music that is concerned with the soul.
Jesus ain't American, you know what I mean? And there is gonna be more people in Heaven who don't speak English and are not white when we get there.
It is possible to call God 'Lord,' to feel emotionally connected to faith, to do the altruistic things and still not want God.
Honestly, the pains of humanity have been draining me.
Gandhi said it; Frederick Douglass said it. A lot of people have probably said 'It's not Christ that I have a problem with, it's his people.' And that was my struggle: it's God's people. I felt disenfranchisement. I felt so much abuse from organized religion because I'm walking in a direction that a lot of them couldn't fathom and can't understand.
Many times, that's how people see Christian art or Christians making art: They see the art as having an agenda.
Christians need to embrace that there need to be believers talking about love and social issues and all other aspects of life.
I knew my ways were unfulfilling. I chased power, pleasure, possessions, something satisfying. I knew I kept getting let down. I knew it was insanity, and I was never going to find fulfillment, but I didn't know what else to look for.
If my significance comes from God, then I know I'm always secure.
Waka is really intelligent. A lot of people don't know that because he just gets people hyped up, but he's a dynamic individual, and once you get to know him, you get to see a lot of that.
I spent some time in Cairo, and you see these Coptic Christians and Muslims holding hands. They got a rich history together of working together and cohabitating. You couldn't pay to see that in America.
Being faith-driven, being a hip-hop artist, being artistic in an urban context - all of those things make you unique, and you put yourself on the outside of what's considered the norm.
