When I have to make records for people and records for myself, it's two different approaches. |
When I lose touch with the audience and the reality of what life really is, I'll be Vanilla Ice or something. |
When I think about the biggest studios in New York, they're owned by people that are not musicians or artists, and artists come in and spend their money there, and they'd rather do that, as opposed to getting the headache. So they pay someone else to get the headache. |
When I'm rhyming it's all in my head... Like the slaves, when they were picking cotton, they would block out their minds. They would sing. |
When we produce our stuff, we're cool. But when you're producing artists, you take the role of a psychiatrist - a musical psychiatrist. You have to work slowly with an artist to show them how to do it. It's all about just doing the best music for the individual. |
When you go to Carnival every year, you bounce to, you-know the different music that make it to Carnival in Trinidad. It don't matter about the country you're from. |
When you pick up The Carnival, you get the big genre. |
When you throw on a Bob Marley record, it's nothing but lighters up in the air. All the thugs in the dance are just going calm down. I don't know no other artist that you can throw in the middle of a dance like that. |
When you're an artist, if you get a 10-year run-some are over 10 years - and you're successful, if you make over $20 million, then you gotta figure the money that you dished out and you spent on videos and studio time and all that stuff, you were just better off investing $4 or $5 million. |
When you're in the Caribbean, you're having the best time, you're hearing a lot of beats and rhythms that you don't hear in New York sometimes, 'cause then you come back and it's snowing. |
When you're in the studio at a young age, you're not aware that there's a union where you can hire musicians. So you have all of this equipment and you just learn how to play it yourself. |
When you're sleeping or getting up to go to school, that's when we're just leaving the studio, and we'll be gone for three hours and then come back and be working another 15 to 20 hours. |
You all know I can play the guitar, you all know I can sing, but what you all forgot is these are all the beats that I come from. |
You be in a club with these girls and they're looking at you, giving you play, but you don't want no play, because you realize the next week Jay-Z comes into town and it's the exact same thing. If you value your life, you're not gonna be doing that type of thing. |
You come to our father's church, we would be playing, rocking that place upside-down. So he wanted us always to stay in that realm, and do education. But I sort of like drifted, 'cause I grew up with a lot of street cats, so hip-hop was one of my loves. |