“The average rap life is two or three albums. You’re lucky to get to your second album in rap!”

My passion is music, you know, and music influences culture, influences lifestyle, which leads me to ‘Roc-A-Wear’. I was forced to be an entrepreneur, so that led me to be CEO of ‘Roc-A-Fella’ records, which lead to Def Jam.

I’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people.

Primarily I see myself as so much more than a rapper. I really believe I am the voice for a lot of people who don’t have that microphone or who can’t rap.

Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who’ve never done anything because if you haven’t been successful, then you don’t know how it feels to lose it all.

Just strengthening that theme that America is a place of opportunity and hoping to inspire people to fulfill those opportunities, and to want more, and to want better, and to see the places we can go. So many people identify with me because of the place that I come from.

If I go into a studio and find my truth of the moment, there are a number of people in the world who can relate to what I’m saying and are going to buy into what I’m doing. Not because it’s the new thing of the moment, but because it’s genuine emotion. Its how I feel. This is how I articulate the world.

I’m just making an observation. They’re crying out for the love that maybe they didn’t get at home, and they got everything.

People really feel like music is free but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap, and it’s good water. But they’re OK paying for it.

By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.

As an artist, you make music. And if you see people who don’t know how to market your music, you get involved in it. Otherwise, what you want to accomplish ‘gets lost in translation’ – no pun intended.

For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton… it’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians – by America in general.

My first album didn’t come out until I was 26.

Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don’t think it’s given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely.

Do you know how many athletes go broke three years after they stop playing? I want to help them hold on to their money. I mean, I know about budgets.

That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club.

I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.

I hate albums that are really happy. When I am really happy, I don’t like to hear happy albums, and when I am really sad I don’t wanna hear happy albums… and I tend to gravitate towards the lonely and isolated anyway when I write.

My album focuses on unrequited love quite a lot because I don’t think it’s spoken about enough in music. I’ve been through it myself and I found it hard to find songs that were about that, so I’ve definitely tried to make that a part of my album.

It takes a lot of people years to turn a negative into a positive. It takes me, like, an album.

What I’m hoping is that every album I’m going to do will give my audience something different, and that they’ll grow as I do.

It’s very hard to be an artist, on my first album, and I’m like asking for money for a music video for every song – it’s so hard to do. You have to pick your battles for sure, but I definitely want – and I’ve always worked to make it all connect – for all of it to feel cohesive.

When I first started writing the album, “Cry Baby” was a song that I really wanted to write because it represented all of these personal insecurities that I had for a long time.

People don’t make albums any more. It’s always about singles. I wanted to take that old-school approach.

Cry Baby wasn’t necessarily a baby theme but I understand what they’re saying. So like, Cry Baby is definitely a remaining character throughout all of my albums.