Well before I was rapping. I was just a regular kid in school. I just liked to chill my friends and play games and stuff like that. One day at school my friends were freestyling at the lunch table and thats where it all started.
I started rapping towards the end of middle school. In high school, with a lot of my friends, we would make beats and just start rapping - beating on the wall, beating on the table and freestyling.
I dated my first girlfriend for, like, two weeks in high school, and when you're in high school, it's so much different. I wanted to hang out with my friends and play video games and play paintball and do guy stuff. Girls were never around for my friends group.
When I was a kid, I was just rapping about school and stuff like that.
There were many things in my childhood I sacrificed: I started travelling quite young, compromising school in terms of learning and time with friends doing normal stuff as a kid you want to do. But obviously I wouldn't change a day.
Gibberish rap is - I freestyle all the time, just hangin' out with friends. And sometimes when I'm freestyling, I'll lose my flow, you know, but I'll still wanna - I don't wanna just stop rapping because I lose my flow. So I'll just put in nonsense words till I can bring in regular words again.
There was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by [Laszló] Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we [with Alix MacKenzie] didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.
I really didn't want to rap; I was just a regular kid. My friend - his name is William Aston - we went to the same high school together, and he was rapping. He put out a freestyle over Chris Brown's 'Look at Me Now,' and it was fire, and the whole school went crazy.
Rapping was something I always wanted to do, so after school, my friends and I would catch the bus to my house and just sit there writing songs, every day.
I wasn't rapping and freestyling in high school. I wasn't telling people I was gonna be a rapper when I was a little kid. It wasn't set in stone that it was my dream.
I always grew up around acting. I did commercials as a kid and all that kind of stuff and my oldest brother did theatre in High School. It's funny, when I was 15 I had a friend of mine who dragged me away to a camp at Boston University. It was the first time truthfully that acting didn't feel presentational; it felt very personal. I didn't just feel like I was singing and dancing for my friends in High School. It felt like I was doing a scene and all of a sudden I started to feeling something - I started to feel emotional.
I'm a chill guy, a very normal guy. I hang out with my friends, play video games. I'm just a normal kid.
I was awkward in school. I didn't really fit in with any kind of crowd in school. I didn't have a lot of friends. But the friends I had were very close friends.
They should just open lots of YouTube schools... as well as, like, a games school, where you can play all types of games. Like, if you want to play racing games, you go there and become a pro at that. Same for football or a shoot 'em up.
There was a lot of drama in school because, well, people have problems at home and they take it out on their friends in school. Trying to impress people, they became bullies. I hated it because I know what it's like to be picked on, and I never liked not fitting in, especially moving around so much as a kid because I was an Army brat. My dad was in the Army.
I don't know how I started rapping. The first I did was at school. I tried writing one. I liked it. People started to like it. It was what I wanted to do.
When I started going to school, I started getting used to things, like the language. After that, I started adapting to school, friends, and everything. It was really difficult, to start with, but I survived.