
The very talented Wale has landed the cover of the latest issue of Honey, sitting down with the magazine to discuss everything from his success to his rumoured relationship with Solange Knowles.
On the poor sales predictions for his debut album Attention: Defecit:
“This is my biography,” Wale says of Attention: Deficit, which leaked a couple of weeks before it’s official date. “It’s honest. Raw emotion. It’s close to me. That’s why part of me will be a little offended if it doesn’t get heard. I don’t want people to take lack of sales as me taking a hit. This is something different. My label is letting me put out an album with a single that released seven months ago. We’re not going for first week sales. We’re only shipping out 30,000 of them. We’re going for that grind. We’re showing people that you can build a fanbase the old fashioned way.”
On being compared to Kid Cudi and Drake:
“I’ve got work to do before I can even catch up to Cudi and Drake,” he admits. “They’ve progressed a little bit quicker than I have. I worked twice as hard because I wasn’t fortunate enough to be under a successful rapper to inherit some of their fan base. I had to work for it all and my city had to hold me down.”
On commercial music:
“I think people try too hard to market to females,” says Wale. “They insult their intelligence. I feel like there are going to be a lot of females who miss out on some great music on my album just because I wasn’t a huge radio artist.”
On his rumoured relationship with Solange Knowles:
“I do love her. We’re friends. She’s amazing. She’s a good person. Any single mother contributing to society the way she does — I got a lot of love for them. She’s got to do a lot on her own and raise a young black man in this day and age, so my hat goes off to her. She’s definitely an anomaly. And the way she can do that and manage to do the same things that I complain about having to do.”
“Did you interview Solange about me? Did she smile when you mentioned my name?”
On settling down:
“It would be nice to settle down,” Wale says. “I wish that was coming soon. I’ve done a lot, man. I have no interest in accidentally getting a groupie pregnant, I’ll tell you that much. I don’t want to be the 50-year-old pops. I wanna be like, Yo, I’m bout to take off tour, go fly to see the wife, the girl, the kids or whatever I got, then come back to this bullshit-ass lifestyle with all these fair-weather friends. It’s about real love.”
Wale is the truth. Make sure you go pick up his excellent debut album Attention: Defecit, it’s in stores now.
Click below for the full photoshoot.
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