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I can remember the first time I ever recorded my vocals on to a beat. Cat Coore from Third World - a legendary Jamaican band - had a little demo set up at his house. I'm very good friends with his eldest son, Shiah, who plays with me now. So we were rhyming over a track by the dancehall artist Peter Metro. I've still got it somewhere.
I emceed in metro Detroit throughout college, and even when I moved to New York, I would actually fly back on a Friday, emcee on a Saturday, and fly back on Sunday so that I could audition during the week. It was a big part of my life.
I believe in miracles. At the age of 13, I was on holiday in Moscow with my mother. It was the only trip I took in my whole childhood. We stepped off a metro train and were approached by a talent scout who told me that she wanted to sign me to her modeling agency.
The Adversity Index was created by msnbc.com and Moody's Analytics to track the economic fortunes of states and metro areas. Each month, the Adversity Index uses government data on employment, industrial production, housing starts and home prices to label each area as expanding, at risk of recession, in recession or recovering.
I am not suggesting that just by taking the Metro, I will save billions. But I hope others will follow.
Everything I've done in my career has started in and around Detroit, you know, the metro area and Michigan.
I hate people walking down the street listening to the soundtrack of their lives which responds to them but not their setting. I hate the overspill of sound which metro and subway riders are oblivious to because they notice no one and nothing around them.
I think the men in L.A. are very rugged, good-looking. Men in New York look metro with their manis and pedis and their Bruno Magli loafers, but inside they're very masculine - aside from the Meatpacking District. The problem is the men in New York are five to one: five women to one man.
Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?
I do have ambition - I can dress up for a premiere, get in a limousine, but it's not my life. My life is wearing jeans and tennis shoes and travelling on the metro. I have to do that because otherwise my acting is going to be false.