WM: No, he's not a spearhead, he's just the most accomplished.

THC: Many critics consider your views on modern hip-hop culture and music conservative. What is your response to people who say you are out of touch with the culture?

WM: That's one vision that could perhaps be the case. But it could also be the other case.

THC: Which would be?

WM: That I'm in touch and that it's actually some bullshit. It could be either one of those; it's up to everybody to investigate and decide for themselves. But in order to investigate you have to be able to step back far enough from something to see it for what it is. All of the most absurd things in history went largely unquestioned, because people were already indoctrinated in them. It would be something like going to the Coliseum if you were a Roman. The fact that people were getting killed and eaten by lions didn't seem strange to you; you grew up with that. Hip-hop's language and messages are normal now to people, normal to someone my son's age. I remember a time before that came in. To me it's still hard for that to become normal, it's hard for me to accept that. It 's hard for me not to see it as another commercialization of something, making money through exploitation. Now I could be wrong. But I could also not be wrong. That's about the words. I'm not wrong about the music.