"The reason why I love this album is because I was a little older, I was in sixth grade. What really made this album incredible was the production. This was the first time I started really taking notice of the production on an album. I knew the beats on All Eyez On Me were incredible, but it was the first I said, ‘Damn, there’s a lot of live bass on this album. There’s a lot of live guitar.’ Everything had a sound, and it’s some of his deepest material front to back. ""Collectively, from ‘Hail Mary’ to ‘Krazy’ to ‘Against All Odds,’ it’s deep. This album gets better for me as time goes on. Me Against The World is like that too, but Makaveli is really the one where the older I get, the more of it I get. Every year that I get older, I hear this album differently. I know more about life, so I’m like, ‘Oh shit, this is what he meant.’ So Makaveli is super special. I could talk about that album all day. It was the percussion value, in terms of it sounding tight and live and jazzy in a sense, and his deepest lyrics"

"Malle is one of my favorite directors. He flirts with genres, tries all sorts of things, travels all around the world, refuses to let go of documentary, his first love (or first milieu)—although his fiction movies are acclaimed. This film, close to his skin and past, is a strong coming-of-age work, set in France under Vichy. Often, in the middle of the day, I think of scenes from Au revoir les enfants, moments of grace like the restaurant sequence, with the mother. French officers burst into the place and ask for citizens’ papers. They find an old Jewish man dining quietly at his table and start to reprimand him, asking him if he knows how to read; the place is, of course, forbidden to “youtres,” as the young French officer says insolently. Suddenly, every patron at the restaurant starts yelling at the officers, insulting them (“Collabo!”), forcing them to leave. And then, among the clientele, German officers stand up and order them to exit the place. Strong turning point. That is exactly Malle, in there, striking again. Contrast, antagonism, emotions, brute emotions. The rest is craft and mastery. But emotions. That is what he aims for. That is what we get."