It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders the day I finally finished both verses for 'My Shot.'
Black Thought
Don't do anything for fear, because fear will never do anything for you.
You can only be the great artist for so long - come out with effort after effort that garners all this praise.
We're trying to plug a void and bring what's been missing back to hip-hop.
Passyunk Productions is our film & tv production company. The name comes from a street in Philly, Passyunk Avenue, where the concept of The Roots was born, as Ahmir and I started out busking on the corner of 5th & Passyunk back in the early '90s.
I'm anti-ageism in the arts.
I strive for improvement. want to be a master of my craft.
Everything we've ever done has been for artistry's sake, and for the greater good and paying homage to those who came before us and paving the way for those who come after us.
The Roots - we signed our first record deal when I was about 19 years old.
There are some millennial artists that I totally get and understand, and I know what they're talking about. People who I've worked with and who I'd like to work with. But there's a whole element of artists that I can't explain what they're talking about.
The difference between a Black Thought album and a Roots album is the texture, the instrumentation.
I think the true artist - musician, dancer, writer, actor - a true artist is able to sort of articulate pain and tragedy, in a way that sort of expresses what the listener or the beholder may have been feeling but was less able to communicate.
I feel like the youthful experience is what drives the creativity, and I feel like experience and maturity as an adult, experience as an elder statesman, that refines it.
If hip-hop is dead, then let it rest in peace and let's move on to something else.
I feel like Black Thought is a name that has so much meaning and depth, not only to me but to my fans, that it's something that I wanted to hold onto a little bit tighter.
I think poor folks are the only people who cannot afford - financially and otherwise - to be sick.
When I was coming up, a freestyle wasn't a freestyle unless everything was completely improvised, in-the-moment and right there, and you had to incorporate various elements of what was going on in the room on the day.
I got a family to take care of and kids to feed. That's my motivation, this is my job.
I love Trader Joe's.
The Evolution of Greatness' was an amazing experience, and it's something that we hope to have been a steppingstone for us to come back and not only do more NBA All-Star performances, but do halftime performances at events like the Super Bowl.
There probably won't be an animated The Roots or Black Thought as there was, say, an animated Michael Jackson when 'The Jackson 5' cartoon show was on when we were kids.
So in my personal opinion, I definitely feel like I'm a legendary emcee, and I also feel like we're a legendary brand, which is why I started rebranding ourselves years ago by saying 'The Legendary Roots Crew,' which is how we're introduced on 'The Tonight Show.'
By the time I was, you know, 16 years old, I had done a lot of growing up.
Nah, I don't feel overlooked, underappreciated, or none of that because it's a short list of artists, past and present, that I kind of have respect for. And in all of those situations, the admiration and respect is mutual.
I want to be at the top of my game.
We record in the spirit of the Berry Gordy camp and Gamble & Huff, where people were writing up to a dozen quality songs within a day because the competition was that hard.
I was raised as a Muslim.
In a lot of places Jay-Z is considered God, Philly, our hometown being one of them.
I'm not driven by the spotlight and I'm not that outgoing.
The most profound memory I have from my childhood is burning down my house at 6 years old.
I'll read a book. I'll watch a documentary or a film or whatever. I'll go to an art exhibit and just try and open myself to influence.
We usually overrecord. Then we boil it down to the cream of the cream.
To me I think leadership is activism. It's giving back to your community, it's investing in oneself, and you know women and children.
Something that is funny, that I use sometimes if I'm doing comedy, is the fact that I'm now often mistaken for the rapper Rick Ross. And I don't know that I've ever corrected anyone - like I've never said, 'No no, I'm not Rick Ross, I'm Black Thought from The Roots.'
I like to say hip-hop was born when I was in my mother's womb.
What we were doing was alien in '92. We were less than immediately accepted by our fans and peers.
I think we could really play the Olympics.
I'm tryin' to get some acting credibility, get some other work.
I'm down to work with anyone as long as it's an organic collaboration.
I remember when I was 15 or 16 years old, I couldn't imagine what life would be like past the age of 30, just because I didn't know that many men who had lived beyond their 20s.
What we do every day onstage, there's lights, there's lots of other musicians, there's an audience, there's a microphone and mic stands - layers of the onion we have to kind of hide behind.
I've become a functioning cog in the machine called The Roots, but in my youth I was comin' from a more braggadocious, egotistical perspective.
There's a lot of terms we come up with for the music that we're making because we want something that's going to be definitive. Often there is no word to encapsulate the emotion that the music represents.
I made the mistake of going to a barber who was not from Philly, and let's just say, I would never do that again.
I like that the hard-core ruffians, the street thugs come up to me and say, 'Man, you killed it with Adele.'
For me, I'm a super private person.
I'm in great company and some may say that the underexposure has added to my allure and the staying power of me as a MC and The Roots as a band.
For me, the arts has always been sort of my saving grace.
I mean, I'm no superhero.
Lots of people are saying that I shut down mumble rap in one 10-minute setting. But that wasn't my intention, because mumble rap - if we go back - that's something I invented.
