I had to realize that you can't try to get money, support yourself, and grind doing whatchu need to do at the same time. The music is the grind. You really gotta grind. You gotta find your way around. You can't be stuck tryna get there.
A Boogie wit da Hoodien
When I was 13, before I got in high school, I was writing mad raps. I didn't really know if it was good or not, so for a year, I just held them. When I got in high school, I started spittin' bars.
Even though I can't dance, that's, like, the one thing I wished I could do growing up. I used act like I was MJ, doing the moonwalk, tip toes, leg kick, all that.
I pick and choose what I want to put on what. Instead of just dropping a single, I like putting projects together.
Growing up in Highbridge was real. Me and all my friends, we never really went to any other places in the Bronx but Highbridge. We always just stayed in Highbridge. It was like territory, to be honest, because Highbridge is like a town.
Some of my songs are turnt up, but that's just 'cause I have to make 'em like that so the clubs can play them.
This is the most fun thing in the world to me, making music. Sitting down, I can make songs and not leave the booth, ever, and I love it.
You can't say I don't sound like a N.Y. rapper - it's because I don't wanna sound like nobody else.
2017 was crazy when I made the 'Freshman' cover 'cause I looked up to it, and I really wanted to be in it. It was motivation for me after that: I kept on going, and I grinded.
Everybody was always telling me to rap and freestyle. I used to go to the park and spit on the mic. If I go to the park, they always gonna give me the mic.
You always gonna feel me. That's my main thing. When I'm speaking in my music, you gotta feel me.
People's hustle in the Bronx is real.
One day, walking through the Bronx streets, I just realized that people were stopping me, taking pictures, and noticing me from across the street. I can't even use public transportation anymore, so I kind of stopped going places and started going straight to the studio, going home, and telling people I can't go anywhere anymore.
I was trying to make my name just Artist in the beginning, but it was weird at first, because I wasn't an R&B singer or nothing. Not an R&B singer. I didn't do no melodic songs, none of that yet.
'Remember the Time' and 'You Rock My World' from Michael Jackson were two of my favorite songs ever. My mom used to bump them all the time.
I was inspired to shoot 'Look Back at It' in a high school because I'm like a voice of the youth. When the youth sees me in a classroom, I want them to be inspired to accomplish their dreams. I was just like them in a classroom at one point. It all starts in a classroom.
I got so many people that have my number. It's crazy. I just don't feel like texting anybody back after I get, like, 30 text messages in three hours. I just be chilling.
I'm not the type of person who makes a lot of songs in a day just to see which one is the best.
Most of the time, I'm making music. There'll be moments of my life where I feel like I gotta to take a break and come back to the music. It's hard to explain, but you need to get a break from it and then come back to it. It's like you gotta lose something to appreciate it.
I used to record songs, like, play the beat from one phone and have another phone recording me and just rap. Moving from that to a studio was like, 'Damn, I never knew I could sound like this.' It was just magic.
Not everyone's really got the heart to talk about what's going on with their love in their music.
I was raised hearing music everywhere I went.
Getting people to like my music was challenging at first. It's hard to get people to like your music. There isn't a simple formula that automatically makes people like you.
Before I was even famous, I was famous on Facebook.
I always looked up to people who did more than just rap or focus on music. I'm inspired by the people who put their different talents to use and turned it into something bigger.
Having a daughter made my music, I guess, more meaningful. It made me see more of life when I had my daughter.
'A' comes from Artist. And 'Boogie' from the Bronx. 'The Hoodie' part came from just having a hoodie on a lot.
I want people to really recognize that this is what I am naturally good at: I'm really good at making music and describing your feelings vicariously through my experiences, through my past and my future. I want people to relate to me in multiple ways and be versatile in my music.
I just wanna be relevant.
No matter where I'm at in life, whether I'm in the music industry, rich, poor, everybody need love in their life. Gangsta or not, everybody need love in their life. You can't act too hard about that.
One of the small joys that's easy to miss in London is the blue plaques on buildings. These are put up to commemorate the famous on the houses they lived in.
The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.
My only piece of advice is that all of you consider every single text and Snapchat that you ever make as also being shared with your partner, because they all check your phones all the time - trust me on this one.
I've often been accused of dressing too well. I've always been fascinated by fashion, though I don't think I'm particularly fashionable.
Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we already secretly know that it doesn't do what it promises. Nothing has ever given us as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our first wage at the end of that first exhausting week, paid in folded cash.
This is the trouble with cheating: there are no acceptable rules, or laws. It could be a smile, or dancing to a song that you considered to be indefinably 'ours'. It can feel like cheating to go to a restaurant that you used to go to with someone else. Keeping photographs of exes can infuriate, like retrospective cheating.
No 13-year-old or over should ever be seen in trousers that finish above the ankle. It doesn't matter how good your legs are, or if you're on a beach in Bermuda where they invented the things.
I'm too vain to go on TV. I'd be a monster of self-consciousness. Plus, I've got a ridiculous voice - I sound like a camp friend of Bertie Wooster's.
The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who's got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors.
Cowboy boots you can't wear unless you actually are a cowboy or in a Status Quo tribute band, or over 60; there's something about a retiring gent in cowboy boots that looks sort of presidential.
Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.
Have you ever wondered why the rich and privileged care about, or even bother with, the gift bag? Because they don't need this stuff. If they wanted it, they could afford to buy it, without blinking. But they love the gift bag, beyond reason.
In fact, everybody should wake up smelling nice. I go further, there is not an excuse, ever, not to smell nice, particularly your feet.
I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.
When Americans come to London they usually say how much they love the history, the tradition, the splendid tumpty-tum of things whose very repetition has become their point.
And learn to tie a bow - it's not difficult and there's no excuse for either a clip-on or the hideous Hollywood straight tie.
It is impossible to be taken seriously in shorts. No one has ever cared about anything said by a man in shorts.
If you're bored, it's because someone else is fulfilling his dream. Become a bore. It's the most interesting thing you'll ever do.
I'm terribly prone to anxiety. I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children.
We have to thank the members of the Romantic movement for the sober colours of suits. It was their love of the Gothic that put us in grey and black but the suit stuck.
