“It’s kind of beautiful to sit inside a bus and see a city from the windows.”
“I just make videos and stuff. There’s not much more to it than that. I’m a musician trying to express myself.”
“I was in a mental hospital. That’s all I wanna say. I don’t wanna say anything more.”
“I’m like Loki in Nordic mythology: one day I’ll be a woman and the next day a snake.”
“I do love my Gucci slides. I wear them inside. I’m like an old Russian man who wears slides in his house.”
“If it was the ’70s, I’d be a punk artist. I was just born into hip-hop.”
“Ever since I was a kid, I had the urge of expressing myself in any way. Like many kids, you want try on different clothes, different looks. I was kinda punky for a while: I had makeup under my eyes. Then I started wearing more baggy stuff.”
“Shanghai was a peculiar city: so many people; everyone seemed to be working all the time. The skyline was beautiful.”
“Yung Lean is like water: he’s always changing due to the temperature, how he’s feeling.”
“Lean just follows his heart wherever it wants to go.”
“I love Future. ‘Turn on the Lights’ is the best song ever. You can cry to it. You can relate to it.”
“After ten albums, I can reevaluate my life. Maybe then I’ll settle down.”
“I get energy from meeting people.”
“I don’t like party music. I like emotional music.”
“I guess I’m just proud that I kept on working, not becoming just a viral hit.”
“As soon as my brain starts working on reading a book, my dreams get a little more exciting, and music comes a little more naturally for me.”
“You can’t really run from your roots.”
“I’m still an outsider in the hip hop community. I don’t even know if I’m making hip hop anymore.”
“I like working with my hands, need to do that more often.”
“My parents were definitely encouraging with creativity.”
“I had a lot of space as a kid. My mother worked with human rights for the government, and my dad had a book publishing company, but they weren’t really musical.”
“I have to pay a huge price to express myself. You get people asking to take photos all the time; you can’t ride the subway… I still ride the subway, but there’s always people sneaking photos or coming up to you.”
“We can be a little less organized in Stockholm; it’s not really that serious. And on the White Marble tour in Europe – I don’t think there’s as much hardcore fans as in the U.S. In the U.S., it’s like this whole celebrity culture.”
“I don’t think I could live anywhere else but Stockholm.”
“I think a lot of American fans or people that read about us – they think that we’re trying to be a part of the American culture, like all these Swedish kids that love America. We rap in English, so I guess there’s something, but we’re very Swedish, actually.”
“I’m really into, like, characters – music characters like Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain – just, like, how they are and stuff. Like Lil Wayne.”
“I’m not a very macho guy.”
“I think you shouldn’t get my music confused with who I am or who we are, because Yung Lean, from the beginning, is like a character created by me. Yung Lean was everything that Jonatan wasn’t. And so me, as a person, and my views on things are certainly different than Yung Lean’s views, so you should definitely not get those two mixed up.”
“I don’t know what I wear. I don’t think much about fashion.”
“I was brought up on Black Sabbath, David Bowie, 50 Cent, and Guru. And it all comes out in my own music somewhere.”
“I made my first mixtape when I was 11.”
“I lived with my parents in Belarus, and I went to Russian kindergarten, which is where I learned Russian. Belarus had just become an independent country; there was no food in the supermarkets, so it looked very post-war, very Soviet.”
“I don’t like being told what to do.”
“I’m not gonna go to university. I don’t want to do anything.”
“I’d like to live in a house in Miami and make music, or Brooklyn.”
“When I was in fourth grade, I made a song about the part in Stockholm where we come from.”
“I don’t want to be a rapper that puts out, like, 600 songs a year.”
“Scandinavian rap started in the ’90s, off the back of Run DMC, and it was a bunch of Swedish dudes doing the same thing.”
“I don’t associate myself with anything. I don’t associate myself with where I’m from or where I am.”
“I hate it when people try to explain music. The best thing about music is that it’s invisible. If you make a song and someone is like, ‘Explain it,’ and you explain the message, it’s like – poof. It all crashes down.”
“I moved out of my parents’ house to a place that’s more like the projects, because I’m living by myself.”
“I’m really like a rat in the rap game. I just drop stuff when I feel like it.”
“I can retire at a good age and still feel like I’ve done something.”
“I’ve always had jobs with hierarchies – wherever I worked, like McDonald’s, or cleaning toilets. It’s always been hard.”
“I’m in my own little world. I don’t get invited into galas; I don’t meet other people that I don’t find interesting. I hang with my friends all the time, and we do exactly what we like.”
“I don’t like political rappers.”
“I didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder. I really wanted to make albums that had a different aesthetic every album and a different sound.”
“I met Fredo Santana three days before he passed. We were in the studio in Los Angeles, actually, listening to ‘Get Rich Or Die Tryin,’ and he’s a great human being.”
“Frank Ocean called me when I was in Stockholm when I was, like, 17.”
“I’m not really into ‘My Little Pony.’ I’m not a ‘Brony,’ just to clear that up.”
“When I first broke out, everyone was like, ‘OK, so is this a joke?’ They had to wait until I sold out shows before newspapers started writing about it.”
“I think people are scared of progress and change.”
“In the U.S., everything is big – it’s like looking through a magnifying glass.”
“I’ve always been an outsider everywhere I go – I don’t fit in with the Swedish rap community or the American rap community. But who cares?”
“The first idea is always the best.”
“America is so much more ‘show business.’ For instance, you have Barack Obama. We have Fredrik Reinfeldt. Everyone in the world knows Barack Obama!”
“I’m building an anarchistic society from the ground up.”
“I worked flipping cheeseburgers and Big Mac’s at McDonald’s, purchased a microphone, and cleared all the stuff out of my basement and started making music.”
“Even when I was a kid, I thought of myself as a celebrity.”
“There was a recording studio in my school, and I knew this kid who had a key, so I’d write lyrics in school while I was in class, and then, in a 10-minute break, I recorded the song ‘Hurt’ in one go at the school studio.”
Leave a Reply