I like whats going on right now, but its still like... What's new? It seems like its all the same, guys a gangsta, been shot... Twice! And shot someone else three times... Its all predictable!" What Rival means is yes its true a lot of rappers are gangsters or classical misfits in society but is that the case always? Drake is currently a well known Hip Hop artist signed with Young Money and he came up from the TV show "Degrassi" so is this the new we're looking for? "This is the thing with Drake with all do respect, Lil Wayne kind of changed him from being a rapper from Canada, to some kind of... I don't know how to put this but I mean you tell me if you didn't know Drake came from a teen TV show would you think he was born an raised in a crime free city? Probably not so much..." So who's next? Maybe it comes down to who can rep the most and its not so much about the music itself. Music is a big part of a lot of peoples lives today... But Rival is still out to answer the question, What's more important to the listeners, What hood a rapper is from? Or what he/she can do with a beat and a pad? Rival has a little insight on the situation, "I think that it depends on what the person is making, if there's one thing people that work with me know, I HATE WHEN PEOPLE ACT, I mean I am an actor, I can act, my teachers in high school could never tell if I was serious or not, but no I don't create my image in music, nor do I place my persona where it doesn't fit just to make myself look better in music"
Now that Rival is making different things in music, and Hip Hop isn't his only genre, R&B got brought up, and he was asked a few different questions; Who do you look up to when writing in R&B? "The-Dream, without a shadow of doubt, odds are everyone's heard a song written by Dream, from M.C. (Mariah Carey) or Umbrella by Rihanna, he's just got it and I know I got it too, it's just gonna take time to get noticed as a writer." Being that The-Dream write R&B would you say Justin Bieber is R&B?"[Laugh] J.B.? Well I suppose if you think about it long enough some of his songs are R&B, but that kid will be soulful pop in a few years, but being that soulful pop isn't a genre, he'll probably get labeled as R&B or just pop..." Do you think if you got noticed you would record R&B songs for yourself? "I am not going to lie, I can hit some notes, and if I got noticed for my hip hop or my writing, I would make both cause I could spend more time on both things so I would have time for it." Rival's views on music today isn't the way the press views it, but hopefully some people can see where he is coming from as a musician in the business today!
