A lot of our earlier material was freestyle tunes.

We always do kinda like the bare bones representation or variation of the voice and drums, which is what we feel is the foundation or backbone of rapping and hip hop.

Although there are people who regard 'Do You Want More?!!!??!' as our first major release, I think 'Things Fall Apart' was the real arrival of The Roots, so to speak.

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.

Passyunk Productions is our film & tv production company. The name comes from a street in Philly, Passyunk Avenue, where the concept of The Roots was born, as Ahmir and I started out busking on the corner of 5th & Passyunk back in the early '90s.

I think we need more community health programs and we need to develop programs that are low-cost.

I give back because that is what I was taught and it is what I believe.

I think poor folks are the only people who cannot afford - financially and otherwise - to be sick.

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.

I'm anti-ageism in the arts.

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.

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.'

It's weird what can trigger the beginning of a song or some bars. It can be a banging slice of apple pie or it can be smelling a certain perfume or something.

I started as a visual artist and I've always dealt with music in that same sort of way.

I've always sort of listened to news radio.

Questlove and I - we were in high school with artists like Boyz II Men and Amel Larrieux.

Philly DJs sort of always won battles and always won awards and stuff like that and were always super sharp.

I used to be a Def Jam artist. I was - I survived Def Jam.

I've never studied music.

The thing that's carried over from my visual-art education into what I do musically is my openness.

You can always hear me breathing during my verses, but that breathing becomes part of the music.

I've become a functioning cog in the machine called The Roots, but in my youth I was comin' from a more braggadocious, egotistical perspective.

I think at the end of the day the diversity has served as a major… that's what has determined the difference between The Roots and some of the other artists from our graduating class. I feel we followed the De La Soul, the Native Tongue blueprint.

The Roots are well-respected and considered vanguards in the music.