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 grew up listening to a lot of early '90s hip-hop. I had the debut Wu-Tang album, Biggie, Snoop, that kind of stuff. Hieroglyphics, the Gravediggaz. I remember D.O.C.'s 'The Portrait of a Masterpiece' was something that had a big influence on me.
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.
I grew up listening to a lot of Snoop Dogg and the Wu-Tang Clan. Actually, I was a huge Wu-Tang fan.
I love Bruce Springsteen's writing, but I grew up on '90s hip hop, like Tribe Called Quest.
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.
I was a big hip hop girl, and still am, I listened to artists like Wu Tang, and K'Naan, but I was a particular fan of Biggie and Tupac.
Socially, hip-hop has done more for racial camaraderie in this country than any one thing. 'Cause guys like me, my kids - everyone under 45 either grew up loving hip-hop or hating hip-hop, but everyone under 45 grew up very aware of hip-hop. So when you're a white kid and you're listening to this music and you're being exposed to it every day on MTV, black people become less frightening. This is just a reality. What hip-hop has done bringing people together is enormous.
I'm really into old school music when hip-hop first came out with Common, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Run DMC. I'm really into that! Hip-hop these days isn't the same and doesn't have the same sound anymore. I'd rather listen to the old school hip-hop.
I liked the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest and Cypress Hill.
I'm really influenced by '90s hip hop. A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul were my heroes growing up.
I wouldn't compare my sound on the mixtape to anything, but my influences are like - the minimal amount of hip-hop that I actually do know - because I didn't grow up listening to hip-hop like that. No one really put me on to hip-hop like that... My dad's from Jamaica and my mom is from Barbados, so that's really the stuff I grew up listening to.
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.
Just coming from a musical family, I was always surrounded by it. On the car rides to school, my mom loved playing A Tribe Called Quest and the Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' and then my dad was listening to a lot of Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder.
The vibe on 'Starboy' comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.
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 grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.