Rapper LL Cool J said on Tuesday (December 1) he was driven to make music because he just wanted to be heard.
Speaking to The Economic Club of New York via Zoom, LL said, “The passion just came from really not wanting to be invisible. When you’re growing up in the inner city, you really do feel invisible. And it’s almost like, nobody sees me. Does anybody care?”
LL spoke about the success of his classic hip-hop channel, Rock the Bells, on satellite radio company Sirius XM. “Right now we’re at about seven million listeners daily, up from about a couple of million,” he said. “I started this platform, it’s a flywheel and it’s content, commerce and experiences. And, especially with hip-hop, we’re thinking about the future and how things can be. We’re not thinking about how things were. So, people out there that are trying to find something familiar in it, it’s only the actual product itself that’s familiar. But our approach to it is very new.”
(Production: Roselle Chen)