I just knew what I wanted to be since the third grade. And I always did well in school, I was the type to get good grades, I never really got below Cs or nothing like that. I always kept it A-B. But there's no school for rap.
When I graduated from high school, the teacher said I was throwing my life away following music.
Lil Wayne is somebody who I used to ride to school listening to in my car. You know from Tha Carter to Tha Carter II, to Dedication 1 & 2, to Da Drought, his mixtapes. You know you got that for him as him being a rap legend, somebody who you look up to.
I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.
The thing was, at a young age, my mom and my grandma always tried to keep me out of the streets as much as they could, so they put me in a private school when I was super young.
Kids that I went to school with didn't know how to interact with black people like that. There were only, like, three or four black kids in the class.