(AllHipHop News) Traditionally, Hip-Hop has not been inclusive of those that choose to live a homosexual lifestyle, but these notions are changing, especially with the younger artists.
A$AP Rocky, one of the prominent rappers from New York, conducted an exclusive interview with Interview magazine speaking on how he changed his own personal biases.
“So now that I’m here and I’ve got a microphone in my hand and about 6,000 people watching me, I need to tell them how I feel. For instance, one big issue in hip-hop is the gay thing,” he said in excerpts published in The New York Daily News. “It’s 2013, and it’s a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It’s crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip-hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip-hop is small-minded or stupid — and that’s not the case. We’ve got people like Jay-Z. We’ve got people like Kanye. We’ve got people like me. We’re all prime examples of people who don’t think like that. I treat everybody equal, and so I want to be sure that my listeners and my followers do the same if they’re gonna represent me. And if I’m gonna represent them, then I also want to do it in a good way.”
He said his upbringing helped him change his views.
“I came up in a world that was just crazy — and it was hectic and kind of radical at the same time. For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the lower East Side and chillin’ down there and making that my stomping ground . . . That was a big thing, because I’m from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded,” he explained to the Daily News. “So I got the best of both worlds. It was like being on the streets and then being in school at the same time, and I tried to keep my hands in everything just so I wasn’t missing out on any fun. I just always wanted to be knowledgeable of my whereabouts, my surroundings, and what was going on with our generation.”
The full interview appears in the April issue of Interview magazine. Click here for more.