"To me, they had the one of the best senses of humor in hip-hop. At the time, people were trying to be serious and shit. They were like, ‘Hey, man it’s about rapping and getting girls.’ Their album had like 20 tracks on it. It’s a sick album. Some of the samples on there are classics to me. That’s another album where I can just always have that on my iPhone and be playing that in my car. If I am going to go for a run, I’ll throw that on. I just think those dudes were hilarious and they did it right and they weren’t cynical. They weren’t about dropping knowledge during that time of conscious rap. They were these smart dudes that were like, ‘Just because we are smart doesn’t mean we have to preach."

"R.Kelly’s Chocolate Factory. I went back and forth with some of these albums because I really like Double Up for whatever reason, it was just something I spun for three months straight. I could just turn it up in the car and drive around. It was just a big album. You know, kind of ridiculous, kind of big in scope. But Chocolate Factory, you just throw that album on, and from beginning to end it’s pretty sick. Do you want to listen to ‘Step In The Name Of Love’ and crank that up? Or, he’ll break it down with ‘Dream Girl.’ That’s a song you can put on a mix for your girl or whatever and she’ll come over and you’ll have a pretty good afternoon. ‘Ignition” is on there, the remix. I played “Dream Girl” at my wedding during cocktail hour."

"Call it Extreme Southern Gothic, New Orleans division. The protagonists of this dark French Quarter novel are knee-deep in murder, torture, sex and cannibalism. The story is unabashedly grim (or as Brite himself puts it, “twisted, horrific”), but Brite’s prose is crystal clear, and his literate tone is sufficiently wry and ironic that it creates a sort of safety zone in which readers not normally drawn to this sort of stuff (myself included) can take refuge while they read. But even arm’s-length readers are apt to find themselves being drawn further and further into the story—seduced in spite of the themselves. Material that would be merely sick, disgusting, and unreadable in the hands of a lesser writer is, with Brite at the controls, surprisingly erotic and captivating. It’s a tour de force, in a literary category all by itself."