Something that is funny, that I use sometimes if I'm doing comedy, is the fact that I'm now often mistaken for the rapper Rick Ross. And I don't know that I've ever corrected anyone - like I've never said, 'No no, I'm not Rick Ross, I'm Black Thought from The Roots.'
I feel like visual art, the culinary arts, the theatrical arts - the medium changes, the tools that you use to tell whatever the story changes, but you're still all telling stories.
To be in a band with the other founding members that never sleep is inspiring. Questlove put out five books a year and deejays every night and still do the same day job that I do, only with more responsibility. It drives me to find a way to juggle it.
There's a lot of terms we come up with for the music that we're making because we want something that's going to be definitive. Often there is no word to encapsulate the emotion that the music represents.
The Roots want to dip our toes into everything in the arts.
I feel like the youthful experience is what drives the creativity, and I feel like experience and maturity as an adult, experience as an elder statesman, that refines it.
So in my personal opinion, I definitely feel like I'm a legendary emcee, and I also feel like we're a legendary brand, which is why I started rebranding ourselves years ago by saying 'The Legendary Roots Crew,' which is how we're introduced on 'The Tonight Show.'
I'll read a book. I'll watch a documentary or a film or whatever. I'll go to an art exhibit and just try and open myself to influence.
When I was coming up, a freestyle wasn't a freestyle unless everything was completely improvised, in-the-moment and right there, and you had to incorporate various elements of what was going on in the room on the day.
A lot of our earlier material was freestyle tunes.
You can't expect every idea of yours to stick or even come to fruition, you have to make sacrifices for the greater good of the team.
I do not seem like a funny guy.
To me I think leadership is activism. It's giving back to your community, it's investing in oneself, and you know women and children.
You can only be the great artist for so long - come out with effort after effort that garners all this praise.
Our plan for Passyunk Productions is to make an impact in the film & tv world by leveraging our collective resources, telling great stories and creating smart programming told from a unique perspective.
You are an instrument if you understand your voice and how to use it - this sound, that sound and certain ranges and different pitch. Within that I try to find a rhythm and play the voice as if it was a horn.
The difference between a Black Thought album and a Roots album is the texture, the instrumentation.
The first rhymes I wrote, I was 9. It was Kool Moe Dee-style.
I think we need more community health programs and we need to develop programs that are low-cost.
For some music, lyrically, the best move is to keep it simple in what it is that you are saying, and just kind of come across in your rhythm and the way that you lock in on the music.