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.
Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.
I listen to everything while I train. From old school reggae, to classical stuff like Bach, to hip-hop, to rock and roll.
Wu-Tang is looked at like the Rolling Stones of hip-hop.
I've got all of the old school vinyls from the '70s - even further back, like the jazz music in the '40s, '50s, '60s. Then I've got all the '80s stuff underground, hip-hop when hip-hop really first started. The '90s stuff. All of the good stuff, because I'm really into music, and it helps me create new songs now.
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 fell into hip-hop right from the beginning. I was a teenager in the '60s, so I was putting all my pocket money into buying LPs. I followed the ascent of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder. I followed popular music very closely, and I've never stopped.
If The Beatles represent the most successful version you can be of a thing, then by that definition The Rolling Stones are The Beatles of music, not counting The Beatles. John Lennon is The Beatles of The Beatles.
We've just been nostalgic about old-school hip hop, listening to it at home and looking at people like Slick Rick and all those guys who used to wear huge jewellery.
I still love old-school hip-hop, but there hasn't been a lot that I've taken from the new stuff.
I listen to a lot of crazy stuff like pop, techno, rock, hip-hop, rap, baladas, bachata...my iPod is crazy. I like listening to a lot of stuff in different languages, so my music is always out there for me.
I've been involved in a lot of different kinds of projects. I've been on straight hip hop tours. I've been on underground rock tours. I've been on multimillion selling rock shows. I've been in the jam band thing, and both commercial and underground hip hop. Very few people listen to one kind of music.
The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles.
I like hip-hop personally. It is a genre I am very attached to and have been listening to all my life. But I have always engaged with foreign artistes, never with mainstream Indian hip-hop rap space.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.