With his Konvict Clothing line out now, the Senegalese hook-master talks culture shock and smoking guns.

As told to Joe La Puma; Photograph by Timoth Saccent/Retna Growing up in Senegal was a totally different way of living—you grew up with a family that lent each other a hand because of the struggle there… But in the U.S., there are so many opportunities, people focus on the hustle to make a situation where they big themselves up. Even though I’ve adjusted, I still have the old-fashioned morals of one-for-all, all-for-one.

I’ve never really believed in overexposure; you’re overexposed only if the music is not good… But if you continue to make hit records, you’re never going to be overexposed because people want to hear you. Music is supposed to spread, you’re supposed to collab and deal with other sounds and cultures. Being stuck on one genre, that makes music boring.

I’ve worked with pretty much everyone I wanted to work with. Michael Jackson was at the top of my list, and once that happened [“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ 2008”] I was like, OK, where do I go from here?... But I would love to work with Beyoncé. And I haven’t done anything with Jay-Z. Other than those two, I’ve pretty much banged out records with everyone else.

Street cred is a bunch of crap, it really is. If you’re going to do hardcore hip-hop, having street cred is necessary, only because people believe their own hype. It’s immature and I think we can find better systems to make and break hip-hop… But it’s a lot of ignorance going on. A lot of people don’t know any better and you can’t teach them because they’re so successful they don’t even want to listen.

When you get these little Smoking Gun articles, I think, after all we’ve done for the community, they try to find stuff to discredit me, not even realizing it’s doing more good than bad. It doesn’t matter if I did a day in jail or 300 years in jail, the fact is I went in and it changed my life for the better…But that’s life. People feed off the negative energy and want to create something to pull you down.

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