Like, a lot of people I know are wanting to get back to the Earth in some way and not raise their kids in this world of Apps and Internet all the time. I grew up on a river in New Jersey and I was in fantasy land. I could do anything.
I grew up loving artists like the Spice Girls and Britney Spears - artists who seemed to live this fantasy lifestyle, and I remember always wanting to join these fantasy people in that world.
I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.
New Jersey is very big. There are different areas of New Jersey. There is North New Jersey. There is like the center. There are a lot of actors from New Jersey that don't speak with a New Jersey accent.
I love dressing up. I'm from a huge African family and grew up in a really colorful place. The way I dress reflects my environment and wanting to take people into a fantasy world for half an hour.
I was born in New York City but grew up across the Hudson River in Alpine, New Jersey.
I think hip-hop has changed. When I first came out, hip-hop was more of a kind of way to learn about new places, new things. What are kids doing on the East coast, what are kids doing here. Then it left that and is like a party mode. I think it's going back to people wanting to get messages and wanting to learn things from the music.
Guys are playing fantasy football; some guys I think even play fantasy baseball. I don't get involved with it. I have five kids; I just don't have time. Not that anything's wrong with the fantasy, but I just don't have time for it with my lifestyle.
I went to high school in New York City. So, I grew up in New Jersey my whole life, and I was watching all the people and all the kids that I met there become so jaded.
Mafia guys are all just insecure people who want their money. They're like little seven-year old kids when they don't get their way. I knew guys like that growing up in New Jersey.
I grew up here in New York City and New Jersey, performing on Broadway shows, surrounded by some of my closest friends from the LGBT community. My father, a minister from New Jersey, shaped my view that love is love, that we are all equal.
We're all just big kids. That's all we are. We are artistes. We grew up wanting to be part of the fantasy of the fairy tales and the stories.
I'm kind of like both of them: My mother grew up wanting to save the world, and my father grew up wanting to rule the world.
I think, growing up in a small town - I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That's the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.
Because I first made my name as a rapper claiming South Central L.A., people often assume I'm strictly a West Coast cat. But my family was actually from back East. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey.
I grew up in New Jersey and played sports and rode my bike around. It was a really nice time - kids didn't have cellphones then - and you knew everyone in the town.
All I know about 1970s New York City is that it's where I grew up, and you always have an umbilical connection to the time and place of your growing up. It was cheap, didn't have too many people in it, you could go to the movies or whatever on the spur of the moment, you could get by without working too much and especially without involving yourself in the corporate world.