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Seeing that almost everything in the music business is digital now, no album is invincible… they all leak around 10 days before their release date, how do you feel about your album being leaked?

My album was leaked about 3 days before street, which is an amazing amount of time if you consider that most people get hit a week or two before the slated release date. And still even though that was the case, we had a worldwide first week of about 9,000 albums sold. I have gotten a big push from digital download but I am not sure if I am going to completely convert the method of delivery in the music to an electronic one but I do take more notice of it. The downloading never cut too far into any of the work that I did, if anything it helped a lot during the first 2 albums that I ever did.

Read the whole interview after the jump!

I’ve listened “The 3rd World” around 20 times by now, and its off the f***** hook… from lyrics to production, great album. Green Lantern is one of the best DJs/Producers out there, how did this team-up came to happen’?

We first started working together after I met him at a High Times Conference. We had a serious discussion about the Palestinian Israeli conflict and the ramifications of continued military action in the region as a staging point for more terrorism in The Middle East. Deep stuff, and I wasn’t even high but a few weeks after that he actually contacted me to do a track for this mixtape that he was doing with Eminem to launch Shade 45 on Sirius. He gave a track that he had Mos Def do the hook on and asked me to write a verse. I came back the very next night with 2 verses and the rest is history. I can say even though that nigga is ultra busy and involved in the commercial side of the game, he has always looked out and been supportive of the music and the message. He never balked at any of the violence or aggression because he understood it’s context and respected it as a stark contrast to the badly explained meaningless crack stories that litter the commercial market. That and the fact that him and Southpaw (Viper Records Producer/Engineer) work well together made the project come together in a timely fashion.

You mention Islam in your songs, can you tell us more about you, religion and music interconnection?

I have a deep respect not only for Islam but for all religions, and those that are rooted in math and science. I think that religion is a very self-righteous but also very inspiring belief system that can enable mankind’s imagination for the greatest of all achievements and the most appalling actions in the world. I see that so much of the world’s history is interwoven and connected with religion since it has become a major building block of organizing society and making it more orderly. A human being will usually balk at taking orders from another man but if he can be entranced by the dream that God made us all equal and yet controlled by men that claim to speak for God, then submission is a matter of time. But sadly in most cases it is not submission to God (as in the meaning of Islam and the message of most religions), but submission to Man.

-Interviewed By Chuck

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