To me, the whole cursing thing is a moral issue and I think people do it based it on their morals. I made the decision to not curse way before the Don Imus controversy. The first song, I had a crossover hit like “Ridin’ Dirty,” and it reaches a lot of White kids. More white kids are showing up to the shows than Black kids. I got 20,000 white kids at the show. My DJ would try to be funny and stop the music right when I was about to say the “n” word just so we could hear the audience say it. So I felt like I’m standing on the show teaching White kids how to use the n word. Most of the time, if you’re selling platinum, it’s White kids buying it. The hood doesn’t buy a lot of records. It’s White kids buying it. People don’t realize that’s really who is buying hip-hop these days. I’m not a rapper that thinks I’m God’s gifts to rappers. There’s a person that stands on my shoulder and tells me, ‘this ain’t cool.’ People don’t realize I never really smoked or drank or cursed. After Don Imus, people were coming to me asking me how I felt, and there’s so much tension, and I said I don’t have to worry about that because I’m not cursing. And everyone just ran with that. I didn’t even want to make an issue out of it, I’m not one of the artists that’s trying to change people. I fell in love with hip-hop because of the raw material. Hip hop was built on rebellion. Even them White kids that are doing it, they’re rebelling against their parents. Like they did when they listened to Elvis. And they made him one of the biggest entertainers of all time.

Now little White kids in suburbs are using it. It’s just becoming so big, with the hip-hop thing, but there’s a big generation gap with the n word. People that were there at the time of the riots, they feel the power of that word at lot more. This young generation doesn’t understand the power of the word. Hip-hop is like a child. It started growing up and finding itself and these parents were not there to help raise the child. And now all these parents (like Oprah) are trying to come back and tell the child what to do. Where were they when it was on its way out of control? They weren’t there, because they didn’t understand it.

I feel like we’re not gaining ground. I think David Banner and other artists had good points when they say pull us to the side and tell us instead of getting on TV and pointing the finger at us. Now you got two sides arguing with each other, and nobody is getting nowhere. I’m just in the middle with a bunch of arguing. I feel like it’s nonsense. I remember watching Oprah and seeing this lady saying things like she want to persecute their language, saying she felt like Snoop should be fired, saying all these rappers who have this negative music should get fired. It’s easy to say that sitting in your big house. How can you believe that? Go to the seed of the problem, instead of trying to grab at the leaves all the time. If you think that’s the answer, what happens to Snoop and all the people that are doing hip-hop, something legal. They are doing something that’s lawful.

One of the biggest artists, 50 Cent, came out with his first album called Get Rich Or Die Trying. You know how many people in the hood have that same mentality? No matter if it means cursing, throwing dollars on girls, whatever. People don’t take the time to understand because they fear what they don’t know, instead of taking the time to understand. Focus on the younger generation, the kids, the ones we can control, they will grow up to be the next generation. No one is a leader right now. They weren’t trained to be that way. All the people that we looked at as leaders, they were trained to be that way. It’s a process. It’s not too many people that look at it that way. The B word, the N word, the F word, it’s all a moral thing inside of each person. If you look at TV, everything is messed up about TV. Gay people kissing each other on shows. The us is in general. Movies, they’ll have guns everywhere, nobody pays attention to that. It’s not just in Rap. And if you take Rap away, there would be something else that replaced it. You could be watching a million TV shows, I guarantee 90 % of them have dysfunctional stuff. You got reality shows where people are running and jumping and breaking their bones. People want it to look all peaches. I have a lot of respect for people who are trying. But when I seen them trying to bury the “n” word, that is funny to me, because they just want it to look good on tv. Bury the “n” word? You know they’re just doing that for TV.

That’s just crazy. I just look at the world like this is just messed up. That’s why the whole argument about the curse words. If you think that’s the solution, you don’t really want to go to seed of the problem anyway. To me, it looks like people just grabbing at the leaves. Don Imus didn’t kill any rappers. It didn’t hurt any sales. It’s just a bunch of people on TV yelling and it’s not affecting anything. I really wanted to do the “Hip-Hop Vs. America” show. I couldn’t do it because I had to do a show in Norway. It was booked and I couldn’t change it. But some people didn’t want me to do the show anyway. They were scared. I was supposed to do Larry King too, and everyone was scared. They didn’t want me to do it. Nobody is articulating things right. All these arguments, no one is trying to understand the other side. We ain’t trying to figure out each other. If you pay attention, if you really wanted to fix the problem, for real, let everybody just stop saying the h word or the b word, right now. But if I say, “for 100 dollars, we are having a wet t-shirt contest.” There will be a line of girls at the door to get wet and look like idiots.People’s morals are messed up. Erase these words from the English language and you’re still going to have a problem. Go into the average middle school, and be a fly on the wall and listen to these kids. Parents aren’t even around their kids to be raising their kids. That’s the disconnect that parents got. It’s such a big disconnect.That’s why I took the stance with my music. We all got opinions. But this is the form that we have to speak, which is music. Even if you do go on these shows, you have a forum to speak, which is your music. This is my show. I gotta say something with some kind of purpose. Rappers have a purpose, whether you’re being clean or not. I do what I do without caring about any backlash.

I respect Kanye. He still get on TV and say whatever is on his mind. He has the guts to do that when other people don’t have the guts to say nothing. Some people don’t have no purpose. Everybody needs to take the time and understand there’s a moral problem in society. It’s crazy that people believe you are instantly a role model if you’re an artist. People are human. These kids now, they look up to you. Some people don’t know how to be that role model your child needs. If my name is pimp c. and I made a living telling you about the hood, drugs, and the streets, how you gonna tell me that I need to switch it up and be a role model? And that’s everybody, I’m talking about. Flavor Flav, he gets to be a role model, because he’s on TV. The terminator is the Governor now.

I don’t think these shows will change the direction of hip-hop. Name one era where they wasn’t people trying to stop hip-hop. There were still Congresswomen saying hip-hop is bad. Hip-hop is still one of the biggest artforms ever. There’s a lot of good music out there and people don’t realize that. I could round up a bunch of good music and I could put out a single and say ‘Fight The Power,’ and it’s gonna be a dud on the charts. Throw your hood up. Tear the club up. That’s gonna be the number one. It’s just a moral issue in society. All you can do is just understand that. If I ever have kids, I’m not gonna try to act like the negative stuff is not out there, but I’ll understand it enough to be able to defend against it.

–CHAMILLIONAIRE

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