It is a tough city to live in (Detroit) but a great city to be around. There is so much promise. There just needs to be a movement to help push the city beyond the automobile industry. The music business needs to learn how to support itself.
I think if you feel weird and self-conscious about that kind of stuff - which happened to me at some points - that means your ego is really kicking in. You can understand how people get to be assholes in music business because it's like you're getting pumped full of your own thing so much, you get ungrounded. That's a dangerous place to be.
When you're a touring musician, you're always turning over new rocks and there's always a certain level of tension in your life. The music business, and the travel that comes with it, is stressful, challenging, redundant, exhausting, exciting, and often very depressing. After all of these years, I'm still trying to cope with aspects of it.
From being a little girl in the projects, going through all of the mess that I was going through, to ending up at the Inauguration for the first African-American president, I'm speechless right now because I never thought I'd - I never ever - I couldn't even see that far. Even when I ended up in the music business I couldn't see that.
The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business.
I've always treated the music business as a business.
I really worked with icons in the music business, which really had a strong effect on me. It wasn't just pick-up gigs.
Some people are the greatest people on Earth with good hearts and will get in the studio and make the most negative music in the world for the sake of success. That's what the music business does to you. That's what capitalism does to you.
You know, my goal, once I leave the music business, is like, 'Man, Lupe didn't lead us astray.' It comes directly from Islam: leading people astray is the worst thing you could do. Especially in perpetuity; like, your music continues to go on and live without you. That risk is too great for me; I'm gonna keep it positive.
If everyone in the music business were brutally honest about what their intentions were then you could sort things out, but it's all smoke and mirrors.
In business, you can have one massive success that earns $50 million overnight, and that's it. You're successful. End of story. But in the music business, you have to keep on doing it.
A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.
This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
Education is extremely important, especially in my business, the music business.
I've been in the music business for 15 years. I've seen it all, man. I've just always been scared of coke. When I was on the road and saw some people do it, I was afraid I would really like it. I was afraid of the consequences.
Image is everything, and the voice or the idea or the song is hardly anything at all. Half the time the person isn't even doing the singing. I'm a bit cynical about this [music] business.
I never really expected any of the music business to happen, but I'm glad it did. It was a very cool thing to happen. It was a hobby for me. I used to do it to meet girls. If you had long hair and could play a guitar then you got girls. That's how I started. Then I fell in love with the music and got carried away.
My goal in this music business is to be here as long as I'm alive. I want my music to be here. I want to be the Michael Jackson and the Prince of hip-hop. I want to be a legend. I want to change the world. I want to give them songs that mean something.
The music business is just the worst as far as Machiavellian, sharky, evil games going on, as far as manipulation.
I was just burnt out. I didn't like the music business and I didn't like me. There's an element of falseness about the whole thing. Even things like doing an interview. It's not as though we just met in the pub and are having a chat - it's part of a process. If you do it all day, every day for years, you end up thinking: 'Who the hell am I?' I was lucky enough to make some money, enough to let me kick back. It was a great experience and it was nice to have a couple of No.1s but the best thing about it was that the money I made allowed me to have freedom and choice in my life.
When I started in this [music] business, I had a dream, but it was amorphous, and I had no experience. I just had a fuzzy notion of what life would be like if I became what I pictured.
Whenever you're in a chaotic environment, there are some of the best opportunities. Nobody knows where the music business is going, but I know one thing: it's going to be about fan-artist relationships and how you monetize that. The business isn't going to turn around the way we're doing it now.
I think for a lot of new bands, although they have a lot of opportunity, this music business is not giving them a long-term career. I think there's some terrible stuff that comes out and we are bombarded by likes of The X Factor, Pop Idol and all those programs that I don't really like and I don't approve of.
I have a lot of dislike for the business end of the music business, particularly what they call shopping for a label. It can be a real stupid thing.
I can't say I was consciously thinking of the big changes in the music business when I was writing the lyrics, but change, uncertainty, flux, impermanence - these are things I'm acutely aware of. And I enjoy facing it all.
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