“I didn’t do anything too crazy when it comes to making this music,” he adds. “I just believed in my sound and I believed in my lyrics. It was easy for me to believe because all I did was rap about my life. I feel like I have a good ear for beats, picking the right beats and I’m big on sound placement — and it came out dope. It didn’t matter to me what anyone said, it was dope as hell to me. And it ended up getting me pretty far, pretty fast. And I thank God for it.”
Hip-hop’s legends aren’t legends because they repeated what those who came before them did. And hip-hop has long been a multifaceted genre. For every polysyllabic storyteller (à la the Notorious B.I.G.), there was a party-starting raunch rapper (à la Uncle Luke); and one’s existence didn’t undermine the other.
And James could care less about snobbery.
