Beauty ain't always a little, cute colored flower. Beauty is anything where people be like, 'Damn.'
When my family first moved to Hempstead in the 1960s, they were one of the first black families. It used to be an all-white neighborhood, but there was white flight when the black people with money started moving in. When I was, like, 13 or 14, Hempstead had just become all black, and the poverty became worse and worse.
The aggressiveness of it attracted me to hip-hop because I was angry inside. I was an angry kid because of the sickle cell. So I liked the anger in hip-hop. That's what attracted me to it; that's what made me want to do it. It helped me get my aggression out.
Just having conversations with God, begging God to make the pain go away, and then the pain wouldn't go away. So I'm like 'Who the hell am I talking to? God is not responding.'
A sickle-cell attack would creep up slowly in my ankles, legs, arms, back, stomach, and chest. Sometimes my lips and tongue turned numb, and I knew I was going into a crisis.
To me, I got a bunch of haters. Mobb Deep - and Prodigy, speaking for myself - I got a bunch of haters.
If you look at my rap sheet, it's very long.
Extreme pain to extreme pleasure has been the story of my entire life.
You have to find a sound that reflects what our souls feel like inside, how our bodies actually feel. That's why we made our own beats. We couldn't find a producer who could give us the feeling to match our lyrics.
I think the sound of 'The Infamous' came naturally from our lifestyle and some of the criminal things we were doing. We always rap about what we're living, and to put a beat to lyrics like those is hard.
Going to jail is beyond what anyone thinks it is.
Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.
You have people there from all walks of life: people who made mistakes and have to deal with the consequences, mothers and fathers. You wouldn't expect them to be behind bars.
You can never go back to a time and try to recreate that sound, because that time is done.
Going to prison actually helped save my life, I believe.
Once I started writing, I realized just how much I really enjoyed it. I was kinda good at it, so I kept at it.
I don't want fans anymore, because the definition of a fan is a fanatic. The people who buy my product and ride with me are my supporters, not fanatics.
'Mortal Kombat' was an ill game. I would always be either Reptile or Scorpion. Those dudes were ill. We used to stay up all night playing.
In the beginning, we might have been focused on totally just music and being famous, just wanting to have fame and make hot music, but as we got older, we had to understand that this is a business and that our moves need to be calculated.
Obama represents one-world government, a.k.a. Neocolonialism. Presidents don't change anything locally - they only deal with foreign policy.
