One of my homeboys from my neighborhood had actually taught me how to rap. He was the rapper and we would all go over to his house. It would be like 10 or 12 of us in there and he'd write everybody's rap in the house and would give everybody four or eight bars.
Without the piano, I would never have attempted to rap, because I'm a poor rapper. I'm enthusiastic, but it takes me a long time to write eight bars of rap. I would battle any pianist, and yet I would forfeit happily before even getting into a rap battle with anyone.
In Chino Hills, everybody is cool with everybody, so I had a lot of friends. My house was kind of the hang out house, where everybody would come over.
Right after high school... the first time I ever recorded music was with a rapper, a friend of mine, and I would just be like, 'I'll sing your choruses.' So I would sing his hooks and he would go in there and rap.
I've been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night... they'd just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it's so thrilling to go there. It really is.
Growing up, I didn't have any comic books, at all. But my friend had a trunk full of them, so comic books were like candy for me. I would go over to his house for a sleep-over, and I would just be devouring everything I could get my hands on. I knew the sleep-over was going to be over, and I was going to go back to my house and it was going to be Kipling.
Everybody in the '80s, well, we hate rap. Now, the biggest rapper in the world... Eminem. Rap's a black thing.
Rap was forbidden with the people who were interviewing us and the shows that I was getting [booked on], and I had kind of crossed over. So Jerry [Heller, who managed N.W.A.] would tell me, 'Do not say you're a rapper, always say you're R&B.'
Rap music and rap records used to always be like this: we get one or two shots to a piece cause it was a singles marketplace and when the major record companies saw that it could also handle the sales of the albums then they started to force everybody to expand their topics from 1 to about 10 and you gotta deliver 12 songs, so a lot of times if you took a person who wasn't really developed, and the diversity of trying say 12 different things, you know the companies were like "Cool! Say the same thing 12 different ways."
For example, I was a White House intern the summer before I dropped out of law school. Everybody knew about it. I'd come home and go to church and everybody would say, 'Oh, my God. Demetri, you're working at the White House.'
For example, I was a White House intern the summer before I dropped out of law school. Everybody knew about it. I'd come home and go to church and everybody would say, oh, my God. Demetri, you're working at the White House.
Rap ain't out there for everybody; everybody can't be a rapper. Everybody can't be a singer; anybody can't just be a songwriter, but it may - there's some profession out there you can be in.
I look at Puff Daddy as somebody that gave me a chance to prove the whole world wrong. Cause when I used to think about rap, everybody would say, 'Well, you talk too slow,' or, 'You rap too slow,' when in reality, that was my uniqueness.
When I got in trouble, my mom would make me read or write - I would have to write my name over and over and over again. It gave me great penmanship, but I also just liked to write. Every time I would go to the store, I would buy a notebook. I had thousands of them.
So I started to relax and would work on my act eight hours a day, sitting at a desk writing at my grandmother's house, and I would put on Richard Pryor Live on Long Beach and would play it like a loop and think and write
So I started to relax and would work on my act eight hours a day, sitting at a desk writing at my grandmother's house, and I would put on Richard Pryor Live on Long Beach and would play it like a loop and think and write.
I would never challenge any rapper to a rap-off. It's weird, I'm not that type of rapper.