Wale got real about the pressures of longevity in hip-hop during a sit-down with Cam Newton, admitting that staying relevant in the game is anything but easy.
“It’s hard, man,” he said when asked about lasting in the rap world. “There’s so many things that throw you off. I lost a lot of friends in the streets or just otherwise, but jumping in the industry, being here for about 16 years… The amount of friends that I lost… It’s not a normal life to live.”
He went on to explain how time in the industry can shift your mindset, making artists more paranoid, and how the music business isn’t always the most uplifting environment. “You could be the greatest rapper of all time, but everybody could be like, ‘Oh I don’t like you, you’re not good.’ So that can just throw you off… The longevity is no joke, man. And the game done change, it keep changing.”
Wale also pointed to how difficult it is to cut through the noise these days, with so many distractions and new content flooding the culture. “Everybody is bloodthirsty right now in hip-hop,” he said. “How many people’s attention can you get? How do you enter the zeitgeist? How do you enter the mainstream, the algorithm? It’s busy. It’s tough, it’s a tough game.”
Despite that, he’s not interested in chasing trends. Wale made it clear he values timelessness, or as he put it, “evergreen music”—the kind that doesn’t expire. “I had to grow up a little bit before I understood how great Reasonable Doubt was,” he said. “When I got older, I was like, ‘Oh snap.’ Everything he’s saying, I didn’t get. That’s why I got to try to make the music evergreen, because it’ll catch up eventually.”
Catch the full two-hour episode of the podcast for more.
