For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.
I never wanted to do the mixtape circuit and 300,000 people hear it and that's a chapter of my life and when I do another album I'm coming off of that chapter but the whole world didn't hear that chapter so it's like I would have to start over.
I listened to a mind joint, and I wanted to do my own version of it, and what you hear on my mixtape is my take on what the whole CD sounds like.
"Snapped" happened maybe like two months after I released the mixtape. I just like took a break from recording and that was the first song I wrote and recorded after the mixtape.
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.
I see a lot of young kids hit me on Twitter all the time, like, 'I want to be famous! Listen to my mixtape! I wish I could be like you!' But a lot comes with it. It's not easy.
[Relationships] never seem to work out, I mean it gets to the point where I have to be extremely cautious. You have to understand, this stardom thing is still new to me, I don't even consider myself "famous". It's 2008: if you have a blog, a mixtape and two pairs of skinny jeans you, too, can be 'famous'.
I am international. When I put out my second mixtape, we did four tours and a tour overseas.
Mixtape legend, underground kings. . . Looking for the right way to do the wrong things