Part of the reason I love Brooklyn so much
is because my grandmother lived in Brooklyn.
And so when I was a kid, I would spend my summers here
and I'd just hang out with my grandmother
and we'd go to the park and we'd have lunch in the park
or she'd take me to the Fulton Mall
and we'd buy like jerseys and stuff.
Together, we liked to match jerseys.
Just, you know, I'd be Jordan, she'd be Pippin, it was fun.
But I just had all this fun
hanging out with my grandmother in Brooklyn.
My grandmother lived in Crown Heights.
And so when I was moving back to Brooklyn, I was like,
oh, you know, what would be really cool
and just like a really cool full circle thing
is if I don't move to Crown Heights.
Cause Crown Heights was scary.
Like when I was a kid,
Crown Heights was a scary * place.
Like any place in the 80s and 90s that a rapper mentioned,
probably is not going to be mentioned
by a real estate broker.
Just like what Biggie said, what, Bed-Stuy?
We can cross that off right now.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Like at that point in Brooklyn,
drugs were maybe the only small batch
artisanal things you could find.
Just like, yeah man, yeah, it's totally gluten free.
And my grandmother, she lived in Crown Heights,
she lived right in the middle of it.
And her neighborhood, her street was rough.
Like I, this is how bad my grandmother's neighborhood is.
My grandmother passed away 15 years ago.
I was in my grandmother's neighborhood recently
and I walked past her building
and her name is still on the door buzzer 15 years later.
Like that is a building that has a super.
All right, if he hasn't fixed that,
he is never getting to your radiator.
Like he still hasn't duct taped windows from after 9-11.
This is how shitty her building was.
There were rats and roaches,
I would see them all the time in the hallways.
And it never freaked me out,
which either speaks to how dumb I was
or how fun it is to be around grandmothers
because you just don't pay attention to that *.
Because there was one time I was in my grandmother's
apartment, I was hanging out in the living room
and this rat just walked through the middle of the room.
Like didn't try to hide onto the walls,
didn't try to like sneak,
just did a pimp stroll to the middle of the * floor.
And I wasn't freaked out at all,
I was just like, oh that's one of grandma's friends.
Like I just figured,
you know, he was like a Disney character or something.
Like I pull out a harmonica.
He pulls out a top hat.
We'll sing a song about sharing.
It wasn't stupid.
It was a bad neighborhood.
There were some dudes who lived next door who tried to rob me when I was a kid.
They lived right next door.
And that's, like, it's sad when you think about it because it tells you all about how people gave up on that neighborhood.
How people just gave up on kids like that.
Nobody went to those kids and got in their ear early enough and said, like, hey, there's more to life.
Like, you can dream bigger.
You can rob people who live a few blocks away.
By people who don't know exactly where you live.