__Pitchfork: I noticed on your new album with Ampichino, you have a song ["No Tears"] where you're rapping—"bathe in a steel sink..."

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TJ: [laughs] Oh yeah. "Sleep on a steel cot, bathe in a steel sink."

__Pitchfork: It seems like you focus a lot of times on prison, and there are tons of people being thrown behind bars, ridiculous number of black people in particular. And it seems like that's something you focus on a lot. Is that something you think about consciously? This is something that I need to be talking about. Or is it just because it was around you?

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TJ: Well it is around me, and I know I gotta talk about it. Not only does it keep people from going to prison, it actually helps the people in prison come to the realization, this is reality. Unless you don't have a family and anything to live for, prison ain't the place for nobody. That's not the place for a young dude with ambition and goals. It's just a waste of time. I make those songs because a lot of my boys, they in there. And to talk about it the way that we talk about it is really just to give people some insight on it and keep em outta there. Especially the young folks. I'm not making it sound cool, I'm not like "Yeah boy I'm fresh out the pen!" Nahh man, I'm not giving them that, it's pain in there. We feeling the pain in this joint. We wanna come home. We sleeping on steel cots, bathing in steel sinks, and it's an eight by nine. That don't sound fun right there, that's not glamorizing it.

__Pitchfork: I notice a lot of times your stuff is very balanced that way, that there's moral content to the rapping you do. You've mentioned Pac in that context before—was he the first one that made you realize you could talk about stuff that way?

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TJ: He really did though, he was one of the first dudes to do it. But even KRS-One, when he hit us with that "Love's Gonna Get You", or Ice Cube when he hit us with that "Today Was a Good Day", or he had that one about a funeral, or Brotha Lynch Hung "Walkin to my Funeral", or even back to Grandmaster Flash when they had that "Don't. Push. Me. Cause. I'm close to the edge." When you listen to the lyrics in that song, that's a deep song, that's some real-life, deep shit. When the beat come on, people wanna bob their head and dance, but when you listen to the lyrics to that, that's just like some lyrics Pac would say. So I probably picked up on it from a lotta different places. But with Pac, he did a lotta shit that made the sound a little bit better. He had his own style, used freshest words. And then he would double his lyrics, he would keep every track! Be like, don't erase any of the adlib tracks, and let it work. So you can hear it in there. You can hear the pain, and other rappers they would do their one vocal track and maybe an adlib. Pac put those adlibs on top of the shit he was talking about and made you feel it harder. When Pac hit the scene with it, it was advanced, he put more into it.

__Pitchfork: In your lyrical style, it seems like you're saying something really simple, but then you realize there's a lot more going on in it. When was it you first hit you, how did that hit you?

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TJ: I really look at it as a gift, you know what I mean? It didn't hit me until somebody else told me. And then I started realizing why people liked me. I knew that I liked to pick certain beats, maybe that was the reason. But I didn't realize what I was doing, but once I realized, I was like "this is a gift, let me do this the right way." I don't gotta rush nothing, I don't have to be impatient. Because when you have a gift with something, it's a blessing. You just use it. You don't have to do anything drastic, because it's in you. People told me what it was, and I just stuck with it. Like you said, it do sound simple. Until you try to repeat it or something. I actually thought it was simple at first also! And then I realized, I'm actually putting in work on these songs. It's not like it's that easy to really make them like that. All I'm giving people is everything I know, basically. If I learned something or read something, and it's real? I'm gonna go ahead and turn it into a song.