I would work on music all night, much to my wife’s chagrin. She was not always down with that but she was supportive of it. She knew I was stressed the fuck out at work, and she would see the joy in my eyes when I did have a show and was able to get on stage and do my thing. I used to work all day, then come home and make shit, which was also how I realized I’d never be a good teacher. The good teachers worked all day and they’d go home and prep for the next day. I was like, “Fuck that shit.” I used to teach with hangovers because we would have Project Blowed every Thursday and I’d be out there until 2 a.m. rapping. Fridays were bad days for me as a teacher. But that’s the thing: my passion was somewhere else. I had to make room for that.

I got laid off in 2009. I was on unemployment for two years. Right at the end of that unemployment was when I started breaking even with rap. That was pure fortune. It was work, too, but I’m glad it happened right then because I was about to have to get another job.

I went on my first real tour in ’09 and learned how to work the right way. My first album came out in 2010 and I started to break even and make a little money even. I was able to start putting little revenue pieces together and by 2011, with my second album [Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes], I was making money.

One of my underground OGs in L.A. told me something in ’05, ’06. People were sitting at his feet and learning game or whatever, and he said: “You’ll never really be able to make money off of rap until you can give all of your time to it.” And me, I’m sitting there as a person who has a college degree, who was teaching at the time. I’m making like $35K a year, which is certainly not rich, but that’s a steady paycheck. I wasn’t trying to hear that shit. I’m supposed to quit the $35K a year gig and just start at zero?! But what I learned is that it was true. You have to be able to take advantage of the money-making opportunities to make the money. You can’t really do that if you can’t ever leave town, if you’ve gotta be up super early doing something else. A lot of this business happens on the road, a lot of it happens overnight, and that’s where the money comes in. You really can’t take advantage of that if you’re still beholden to something else on that same level.

Across the board, people don’t have a unified definition of what “independence” means. There’s all these different expectations that go with the term and how people assume somebody is living. People ask me about my rap economy compared to somebody like Chance because we’re both “independent,” and it’s hard to explain how that’s just two completely different ball games. That’s independence as defined by not being signed to a major label, but it is really inaccurate to put us in the same category when talking about the economics of it because of the differences in what it means to have the resources.