That was again just speaking to that leadership and to revolutionaries who have influenced me, influenced the way I think, and in turn, influenced my pen. The Ummah was a production team, comprised of J Dilla, Q Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest. They also worked with Soulquarians a lot, which is another team like Questlove’s version of the Ummah. D'Angelo was sort of down with the Ummah too. Patrice Lumumba, who was the prime minister of the Republic of Congo, he was just a great leader, and he sort of fought for liberty for Republic of the Congo, when they first sort of got liberty. And then Kwame Nkrumah, he was a prime minister as well. He sort of did the same thing, but for Ghana.

There are just heavy brothers who influenced the people who in turn influenced me. This is people I looked up to and my parents looked up to in the ‘60s and '70s, so I feel like by default, I owe them acknowledgement.

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For years, I’ve been told by lots of people whose opinion I respect, “Yo, you’re one of the best. In my opinion you’re the greatest.” So when other folks, I run into say, “How does it feel to be so underrated?” I don’t really get that. I get that people are getting it. I get that my contribution is super, people are super appreciative for it. People appreciate the contribution that I made.

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Noble Drew Ali. I like to speak to leadership, so you might hear me compare myself to all sorts of political leaders, revolutionaries, great thinkers, that whole thing. Noble Drew Ali, he created the Moorish American society here in the United States, and he was viewed by very many as a powerful leader and a powerful thinker who influenced a lot of other powerful thinkers and leaders.

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“Stranger in Moscow” is a reference to the Micheal Jackson song, but it’s more a reference to Micheal Jackson, the way he was, at that time of his life, when he recorded “Stranger in Moscow.” He was sorta an exile for court procedures, so he was feeling very much like an outcast. That’s something that I’m able to identify with.

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It’s dealing with duality and polarity and just the depth of the person, the range of my personality. I do this a lot, I’ll say this thing meets that thing. It’s kind of in the same spirit of Nas’s “half-man, half-amazing.” I’ll do that thing a lot. I’ll say I’m part this and part that and it’s just me trying to give insight to all the many things that make up the composition that is the man, the myth, the legend.

I definitely wanna send the listener on that Google search. I don’t wanna come off as pretentious or like, “Yo, this is a lesson and here’s the syllabus.” I wanna just drop it in a way that’s so witty and so fly that it’s just gonna make you wanna be able to repeat it, and you don’t wanna repeat it without knowing what you’re talking about. So it’s like, “Yo, let me just go and see what this is.” And that draws people, that expands peoples spectrum, their world view, so it’s dope to influence people in that way.

Dr. Sebi, was a healer and a spiritual advisor down in Honduras who incorporated traditions from the Caribbean and from Africa, and he was believed. He lived to his 80s, almost 90. He was believed by some to have discovered or to have worked on cures from vary many popular diseases. I’m just gonna leave it at that.

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In some peoples opinion, that’s one of Dostoevsky’s best, his finest hour, so to speak. So I feel like that spoke to this time in my life: This is my Crime and Punishment. This will go down in history as my finest hour, and it’s by design.

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The different configurations of a bar are limitless. The limit only comes in when you limit yourself, so I try not to do that. I try not to limit myself to the way a word is traditionally pronounced. I try not to limit myself to even one language. I wanna use words that might rhyme in the same way but maybe just in a different language, you know what I’m saying? Just always trying to push the envelope and raise the bar.

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When I was 18 I was in my second year of college. And I was at a crossroads, trying to decide whether I was gonna stay in school or move back to Philadelphia or just try and dive completely into all things sort of Roots-related. I was getting huge refunds back from tuition, because these college loans and stuff, and then dropped classes, so you get refunds back from mad classes. I was living beyond my means, literally. I’ve always been sort of—not afraid of my dreams, but I’ve always shied away from that, spotlight, and embracing my own, I don’t wanna say power. I never been about that attention life so.

The part about wishing I could flip, you know, it’s rags to riches, like that kid back in the day who started with a paper clip and flipped that, bartered it into eventually a home. Just from a paper clip, he traded that and got another item, and then traded that item, and he traded all the way up to the house that he was living in at the time. I thought that was an interesting analogy, to upgrade even beyond that, to a microchip, from a paper clip, to something digital, from analog.

My first car car was a Toyota Landcruiser, but I used to steal my grandfathers car. He had a Buick Regal. Before that, he had a long Cadillac.

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The way to gracefully get better with time, to age and evolve gracefully in this craft, in this game, is to remain conscious of everything that’s going on. But don’t let it necessarily make you deviate from your natural path. I’m up on what everyone is doing, but I do what I do, so I try to focus on that, and I perfect that, and I try to apply a certain level of mastery, and a certain level of mastery that’s unattainable without practice, so it’s hands on. You wanna be super-super nice with it, you have to sorta use your instrument.

I’m writing every single day, with the Tonight Show job, and all the features that I’m constantly doing, and writing my own music. I’m constantly writing.

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Way back in the day, the first thing I did with bread that I made as an artist—I don’t know if this was any indication of having made it or not, but we went and bought a Landcruiser. That’s when Landcruisers was poppin', and we went and bought the joint cash. You know, off the lot, rolled out with it. We shared it between three people; two of them were unlicensed and uninsured drivers, and we sorta made it work.

You know, you hope every thing is good whenever you make a payment for anything. It’s never safe to assume. It could be any sort of clerical, human, digital, computer error, or you might just not have that dough in your account. I think we all can identify with that sort of suspense. But yeah there’s something to be said about being able to confidently spend tens of thousands of dollars at a time. I think that’s like alright.

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