As promised, here is the interview from last week when I caught up with Wale. I broke it up into 3 parts: Twitter and Blogging, Music, and Word Association; All of which will be posted this week, so stay tuned and check out part 1. 
SwaggerDap: Hey, I’m John. Nice to meet you.
Wale: Nice to meet you, I’m Wale
SD: So how you doing?
Wale: Can’t complain man, it’s the road, I’m on the road.
SD: Cool cool. So I’m a follow on Twitter. And just curious what you ended up getting for breakfast. (He had Tweeted that morning looking for a place in Syracuse to eat)
Wale: Eating? I had a bagel and some Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The bagel was good, the bagel was real good man.
SD: Hah nice.
Wale: I love it, you know I love when I get interviewed by people following me on Twitter. Cause like I get caught in the crossfires so much by trying to please so many people but it’s like I’m just trying to do something different. I’m just trying to show everybody that I’m just like them. You know we could just conversate, let’s talk about whatever’s on your mind. You know I try but I still get that “He never responds” …. If people only knew how many people I respond to… You can see if you look at my profile all of the responses to people who aren’t “famous” and people are still like “Oh he never responds”
So that’s why I love actually meeting someone who is following me cause then you can really see it. I’m not really good at blogging and stuff like that, I have a lot of grammatical errors so Twitter is just my thoughts. I can shoot thoughts back and forth. It’s quick easy but I get the gift and the curse from it I guess.
SD: Yea it seems like a great place for you to network.
Wale: Yea some people care about my Tweets too much though. Like you phone shouldn’t go off when a celebrity tweets. Maybe for your friends or something. I’m not saying I’m a celebrity, but you know anyone who’s a public figure.
I just feel like my job is to show and give people a piece of me so I feel like the easiest way to do it is this (Twitter). Yo I’m just like you. “Whats going on” “I’m eating breakfast” … I don’t want it to be “Oh new record coming today!” I don’t want it to be like that but I feel that’s all some people want. I want wall to know I’m a person though.
I had an interesting conversation with Q-Tip recently. We were on tour and he was basically saying like back in the day it was so different because all they had was a record on the radio and a picture on the album.
SD: And that was their whole branding, crazy right?
Wale: Exactly. Cause now there’s so much more too it.
SD: Could you imagine being there?
Wale: I don’t know if I could have been one of the greatest around like ’95. Like my style of music, it’s cutting edge. Now a days you can’t be cutting edge cause they’ll put you in the bucket “Hipster” … but like the “hipsters” that they’re talking about are the only who are willing to do something creative. And like so what if my jeans cost a lot of money
SD: True. So SwaggerDap’s main focus is fashion and I was wondering how the 10 Deep mixtape came to be. They’ve obviously done a lot for you, Cudi, and others.
Wale: Yea those are just my friends. Emek (Marketing and PR for 10Deep) is like That Dude to me.
SD: So they just love music?
Wale: Yep, so whatever they do, I support ‘em……. You said your site was a fashion blog right?
SD: Yea, we do music, art, lifestyle. Fashion is the main draw though.
Wale: So I know people be sending you clothes then! (laughs) That’s what’s up…. I actually wanted to do something that’s just 100% fashion, like just not focusing on Wale the rapper. You know “is he feeling this? is he not feeling this?” that’s something I always wanted to do but everything is just contingent on me rapping. I mean my Hypebeast blog is cool, cause I do get to talk about that.
SD: We do this segment called the conference board that’s somewhat like that. We’ll have a panel of people, Mickey Factz, Kenn Starr, The Kid Daytona, have all been a part of it. And we pick 5 sneakers from the past week and just get comments on each of them.
Wale: Oh so picking your favorite basically?
SD: Kind of, it’s like a rating of each.
Wale: Oh ok, well mine would always be Nike driven. I only wear Nikes so you know.
-john-
Previously - Wale does Faces in the Crowd
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