My faith informs everything about my life: the way I handle money, the way I handle relationships, marriage, friendship… my music. I think people see faith as a section of their life, like I go to church on Sunday… but for me, my faith runs through the entirety of my life. Were you ever apprehensive about incorporating your faith into your music? I don’t necessarily give myself that title, but I can’t control if anyone else does And I’m just trying to be on the side of making good music. I really think there are two genres of music: good music and bad music. It’s kind of a sticky question… and it’s hard to answer briefly because there’s a lot of philosophical ideas in there too about people even wanting the idea of people selling Christianity to occur, which is some of the tension of the Christian music industry. So yeah, I don’t call myself a Christian rapper, but at the end of the day, I can’t control what anyone else calls me. Would you consider your music Christian rap or not? We’ve got Tribeca… you know, all in the same 12-mile-long island of Manhattan. We have uptown, Washington Heights with Latinos all over the place. It just creates its own culture and subcultures within it… You can explore it and it’s never-ending. There are so many enchanting things about … so many different cultures, so many different people, so many different walks of life all crammed together on a 12-mile-long island. New York City is the greatest city on the planet. New York City is such a big part of your work. Cole and Drake and Kanye West and all these guys, so he was a big piece of helping bring the project together too. So, bringing Illmind, who executive-produced the project with me, bringing him onboard, he really helped me say no to some things and say yes to certain things for the sake of the body of work, and Illmind is a Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum producer for J. A lot of times, artists have adopted the radio structure because that’s what we listened to the most, but I think that’s burned into their creative conscience… I’m so eclectic and enjoy so many different things that it’s hard for me to say no to lots of different things. Those songs didn’t have the song structure that we hear on the radio, and “Stairway to Heaven” is an eight-minute song, but because radio stations wanted to put it in their rotation, they shrunk those songs down to two minutes and changed the structure of them so they could get more advertising money and keep flipping through songs. Also, I was really inspired by psychedelic rock, listening back to some of those records. Going along with the theme of being uncomfortable, that title lent itself to give me space to create in unconventional ways. Why did you decide to incorporate so many different genres into your music and not to abide by song structure? I want to bring meaningful conversations to the table and I want to shake some things up. I think part of growing and maturing as a person in so many different ways, embracing this discomfort and knowing it produces something good in me instead of shying away from it… Oftentimes, I have to shake up my own reality as success is coming my way and want to be sure that I don’t get caught in the trap of comfort… There’s also a quote that was really impactful for me on this album was “Good art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” In hip-hop music, that’s something I want to offer. Just feeling like my life doesn’t make sense. Uncomfortable is a word that best describes where I’m at in my life this past year.
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