“I really just wanted to make something special for women. There aren’t enough records uplifting them out there.”

If you can look in the mirror and say I love myself, that’s going to affect your interactions with people who look like you.

I’ve always felt like I was observing everything, like I’m just looking out of the window, peeping how everybody is living and just penning about it, so I made the album about that concept.

I think it’s good that YouTube decided that they really want to showcase Black talent.

An outside party don’t ever stay outside.

If you tell somebody that you make music they’re all interested. But when you say you rap, they just start rolling their eyes at you. It would’ve taken me a lot longer to get my foot in the door if I’d continued rapping all the way.

I know when it comes to the actual narrative of my solo music, it’s its own thing. That’s why I went out of my way after ‘Crew’ to not do a bunch of collaborations.

I feel you gotta be nervous. If you’re nervous, it’s just ’cause you want to do well, it’s not ’cause you’re scared.

I’ll listen to certain things that I made back then, and I’m like, ‘I wish I could have done this, I would’ve done that’. When you start out making music, you just want to make something that people will like.

Being old didn’t seem like an accomplishment. Everyone I knew who was old was like sick or broke. It just didn’t look appealing until I moved to L.A. and started interacting with people who were 50+ and still kicking it, having money, living large.

I started off making beats when I was like 12. Then when I linked with people who make beats full time, I was like, ‘Bet, now I can focus on writing and singing.’

I was reading Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’. It’s one of my favourites.

Me and Goldlink have known of each other for a minute and our managers know each other so they set up a studio session. When we got in the studio, we was cool; we’re from the same area so we have a lot in common.

In order for people to take what you say seriously, they have to know who you are as a person.

Before anything, I wanted to be a rapper. I used to make beats and I would start singing to layer my beats and that’s kind of how I realized I could sing.

I feel like any way you can get the message to resonate, I’m all for it.

I still got bars, I just use ’em differently. I’d say I’m a better singer than I am a rapper at this point because I’ve been sharpening my sword.

And that’s what brought the regime down. The last South African Finance Minister, Barend du Plessis, went on record as saying that it was the investment sanctions that put the final nail in the coffin of apartheid.

I am the entertainer, I’ve come to do my show You’ve heard my latest record, it’s been on the radio

There were days on that show where I had to go in and record a song, then I had to rehearse the dance for that song, and then I had to go and shoot a separate scene. That would be one day. So yeah, it was about the value of time and being prepared, and not to freak out.

I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.

I didn’t want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

And then all of a sudden that starts disappearing from the book, and just about everything I’m talking about from that point on are the records that I’m totally involved in.

What else but our own sturdy reliance on freedom can explain the unexampled record this country has made?

There was a refinement about his playing. You know, in those days I played a little trumpet, and I could play all the solos from his records, by heart.