From Part 4When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics--not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC--are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.

All of those threads came together at a pivotal moment for me, the moment when I fully crossed from one life to another.