I started listening to old music that represented Mum and us living in west London when I was younger, and delved deep: SWV, Soul II Soul, Mos Def, A Tribe Called Quest, Young Disciples, D'Angelo and lots of Wu Tang Clan.
I grew up listening to a lot of Snoop Dogg and the Wu-Tang Clan. Actually, I was a huge Wu-Tang fan.
We started playing music because of the Wu-Tang Clan.
My dad is from Queens. I remember visiting as a kid. My grandparents grew up here. All the actors I respected were coming out of here. All the hip-hop I was listening to - Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, Biggie, Wu Tang - was coming out of New York. I'm just into it.
I say that I do soul, R&B music. I have so many influences, from Billie Holiday, Nina Simone to Stevie Wonder and Prince and even Al Green and Bjork. And a lot of hip hop music has influenced me a lot - you know - De La Soul and Digital Underground and A Tribe Called Quest.
I grew up listening to a lot of hiphop music and R'n'B. Bands like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Big Daddy Kane, Boogie Down Productions, Cypress Hill, New Edition, Bob Marley, Prince, Stevie Wonder, and a lot of Spanish music.
I started my career as an assistant for Wu-Tang Clan, then transitioned into urban marketing.
To me, Wu-Tang is beyond Wu-Tang Clan... It's just like, hip-hop is beyond Grandmaster Flash, but Grandmaster Flash was one of the first guys to hit those turntables like that. The same thing with Wu-Tang. You'll see the difference in hip-hop from the moment we came in to before we came in. We changed it. We changed the whole structure.
When Wu-Tang came, Wu-Tang was for that era, right there. When Dre had it in the West Coast, it was for that time. Biggie and them, it was for that time.
I am a Wu-Tang member and Method Man, he been a Def Squad member way before I was a Wu member. I was like a Wu member but I wasn't official.
My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music. There are always critics that don't understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion.
Look at music: I've always loved hiphop and rap, and now there's this whole progressive movement, with De La Soul and Mos Def, Common. It's some of the best stuff around.
Soul music is soul music. It can be wrapped up in a neo soul package; it can be called hip-hop soul. But soul is soul, and it's been around; it will never go away.
I thought that Wu-Tang was the best sword style - the best sword-style of martial arts. And the tongue is like a sword. And so I say that we have the best lyrics, so, therefore, we are the Wu-Tang Clan.
I grew up on Wu-Tang and Tribe and Nas, all the raw, very New York-driven music. Then when I got older - in my late teens, early twenties - and that's when I started to listen to Drake and J. Cole, and so it wasn't just East-coast.
When I first started acting, I was actually working with the National Youth Theatre in London doing anti-knife crime workshops, so I was listening to a lot of music that was around us all the time, around the guys I was working with, and the kids - lots of young grime artists from London.