"I’ve loved him since his mixtapes and I love his first album Dr. Lecter. That album has just the best hip-hop beats, but there’s something about his new album that is really fresh. That song 'Baby Blue,' it’s a little more produced and less ‘90s-esque. I don’t know if it’s better because I love it all, but it is definitely a new step—he’s definitely artistically evolving."

"It was a real wake-up call. Hip hop until 1984, 85 was fun but for the most part it was party music. Living outside New York we'd listen to WBLS and Kiss FM where they played a lot of hip hop and me and my friends liked it, but it was very lighthearted. The Fatboys are the perfect example, or the Treacherous Three, where they have disco basslines and this fun vocal. Then almost out of nowhere Public Enemy happened. Everything about it was different. The lyrics were different, Chuck D's vocal approach was different, the subject matter and the production, the Bomb Squad. I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how did they do this, because they've basically made punk rock hip hop, the sounds they were using, the way they were distorting basslines, it was a lot of the same ways industrial records were being made but they were making hip hop. It was so revolutionary. You can refer to musical culture in New York as before and after Public Enemy, it changed the city. New York was so dangerous then, it had the highest murder count, people were getting stabbed and shot and the crack epidemic was decimating communities and people were dying of AIDS. You'd go out to nightclubs in the late 80s and you'd hear these apocalyptic Public Enemy songs that perfectly described the city that you lived in, but they were oddly celebratory and you could dance to them. For better or worse one of the reasons I've left New York is because the city I grew up with is still there, but it's become a much meaner, safer version of its former self. I still love New York, but it's become primarily the domain of hedge fund managers and wealthy tourists, so I don't know how many more Suicides and Silver Apples and Public Enemys and Eric B & Rakims are going to come out New York City."

"When Wild Style came out, nobody knew about the New York City underground. This record and the film became how you found out about shit that was going on at that time because nobody was really documenting it. This movie became so big and it spread the message of hip hop in a way that hadn't really been done on that scale previously. When you look at the total global domination hip hop culture has now, you can see its roots in this film, in this soundtrack. It was mad fucking powerful. This film is written so intelligently and the story is so compelling. I like the 'Double Trouble' scene where there is acapella rapping and the scene with 'The Cold Crush Brothers'. The scene in the amphitheatre at night where they're killing it is another incredible moment. The music was just so dope throughout and it undoubtedly paved the way for things like Hamilton. I saw Hamilton this year and I'm looking around and looking at all these different people – all different ages, races and genders – and I was like here now you can see the real global domination that hip-hop and rap culture has – I saw it at the start with things like Wild Style and I see it now with Hamilton and its some mad fucking shit to see how far it has come. It's like we took over the world."

"Nineties hip-hop has never been bettered for me. I kind of lost interest in the eighties when electro started morphing into hip-hop. It got a bit clunky for me as it tried to sound more real, it sounded clumsier. By the time you get to the nineties, you had a mutation of what's real. The production on The Infamous – sonically it's just genius. It's a shame some of the lyrics are so offensive as it detracts from how good the music is. It's brilliant soundtrack music – it carries on the thread for me of the stomach knot for me, from John Carpenter. I don't know why they were so quick to move on from the sound of The Infamous. I suppose the royalties thing is huge in hip-hop, now everybody buys an off-the-shelf keyboard and has a stab at it to avoid having to clear samples. But it doesn't sound the same. It was hard to pick one. When I got ousted from The Verve in 1995, I stumbled on Tical by Method Man. That's definitely my favourite Wu-Tang record, probably because it was my first. The production doesn't bear any relation to anything I'd heard before. You could draw a parallel with Tom Waits – it's from another world really. That one needed perseverance as well. It sounds shit at first, but then it reveals itself."

"This was something of an anomaly in Faith No More’s catalogue, from a film made in the early ‘90s called Judgement Night. The soundtrack was a sort of experiment where they would get bands - white people, essentially - and they would couple them with hip-hop groups and see what happened. This was one of my first introductions to hip-hop to be honest and it wasn’t even ‘proper’ hip-hop, it was bands playing with rapping over the top. “I just thought it was absolutely amazing and I couldn’t get enough of it, this worn-out tape. ‘Another Body Murdered’ was one of the best tracks on it and it ended up introducing me to loads of bands and loads of rappers and this wasn’t like nu-metal, it was mostly edgy rappers. But then there was also a track ‘Fallin’ with Teenage Fanclub featuring De La Soul, things like that. It gave me a really broad introduction via a medium I already understood, which was bands. “But because it was a faceless tape, I didn’t really know who everyone was or who was doing what on each track. I didn’t realise then what cultural lines might have been crossed, because it was all just blurred into one: here’s the guitar, here’s somebody rapping. It didn’t matter to me at all and I think that was a healthy way to discover that sort of music."

"My third film I want to say is highly recommended — and I’m sure many people have seen all these films, but I’m gonna tell you why — is Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was the first film to me that had a descrambling formula of storytelling, accompanied with the power of perfect dialogue. This moved me artistically. I remember watching this film for the first time in the movie theater, and seeing the character get killed, and then seeing the character come back… He was my favorite character, right? It was John Travolta; at the time, I’m a big John Travolta fan, and Sam Jackson was just breaking out on the scene, but I loved him in the movie as well. But to see the story go into its own twists and turns really resonated with me as an artist and kind of related to the way that hip hop tells our hip hop stories. That’s why I suggest that movie. It descrambled the formula of Hollywood storytelling."