Below is a transcript of this segment:
Glenn: I have to tell you, now, the bowtie says differently, but I’m not down with the rap scene, but I saw this video, and I was so happy to see this. I don’t how many people I sent this to personally before we started posting it up on TheBlaze and GlennBeck.com.
I want you to meet the rapper behind it, Prince EA. He has covered some pretty heavy topics in his videos, including Ferguson and the Mike Brown shooting as well as how to best defeat the problems in the world today, and his answer is very simple, love, love one another. Prince EA joins me now. Prince, how are you? May I call you Prince or EA or Prince EA?
Prince EA: Hey, it’s just a name. Whatever you want to call it, but Prince EA is good. How are you?
Glenn: Very good, very good. Thank you for being on. Let me ask you, first of all, the motivation behind this, because, you know, just about every line in what I just heard and what I’ve seen, the whole thing, I cheer on almost every line. I’m like Yes! Yes! So what was the motivation? Where did this come from?
Prince EA: Well, honestly, before I wrote that piece, I thought about death, and as morbid as that sounds, I thought about death. And that’s something that we all have to think about. And I thought if I was going to die in a week and I had one last message to give to humanity, what would it be? And that came out. The only message worth sharing is one of love and kindness and compassion.
Beyond all of the negative things that we see, our solution is love. And I wrote it just out of love. It’s not even about me. It’s not about Prince Ea. It’s about the message. People can forget about me, but if they watch the video, and they’re changed internally, my job is done.
Glenn: Tell me about you. I mean, what is your…who are you? Where is this coming from?
Prince EA: Wow. Well, I am a 26-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri. I graduated actually with my degree in anthropology, so anthropology gave me away, a perspective on viewing the world objectively. And obviously I’m also a musician, so I combine anthropology with my music and give a lot of social analyses. But where it all comes from, honestly—
Glenn: Let me just back up here. Honestly, this is not the mainstream message, you know? You got this from your parents or something. Where is this coming from?
Prince EA: It comes from inside. It comes from me looking inside of myself. You know, I grew up on the worst part of the worst city in the world, you know, statistically, St. Louis, Missouri. I live on the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, and it just comes from me sitting alone and looking inward as what is the solution? What makes me happy? Looking at the world, what makes me happy? And it’s love, it’s peace, it’s compassion, the most basic ideas that permeate all religions, but not a lot of people seem to adopt. But it came from me looking inside, introspection.
Glenn: I have to tell you, not a lot of people even take the time to stop and look inside. You know, whenever I talk to somebody, and they’re like, “Oh no, I’m good, I’m good,” I ask them, “How long can you be in the car without the radio on?”
Prince EA: Yeah.
Glenn: You know, a lot of people, they can’t be quiet because they don’t want to think the big thoughts and the hard thoughts, and they can’t quite make things connect. I don’t know if you heard the monologue that I said beforehand before we went on, but we’re a globe, we’re a people—this is not the president. This is not politics. It’s not Washington. It’s not the Tea Party. It’s none of that stuff. This is happening all over the world, and we’re spiraling into this nightmare. And culture is leading…I can’t say…let me ask you, is culture leading the way? Are we following or are we leading?
Prince EA: Totally. It’s a combination of both, you know? It’s the culture that, you know, it’s interconnected. But I think that, you know, it’s an analogy. You want to change a tree, a tree lives on its roots, right? You change the roots, you change the tree. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the human heart, and the culture will follow. So it really is an interconnection of both, and I am an artist that wants to connect with people’s hearts because I think the individual is everything.
If you’re in a movie theater, and you don’t like the movie, you don’t go up to the movie and start beating up the TV, the projection, the TV screen, you know? You go and change the film. So I believe that in order to have external peace we have to have internal peace in ourselves before any change is possible.
Glenn: Play devil’s advocate with you.
Prince EA: Okay.
Glenn: We are a very small group of people that believe this way. You’re a small rapper. I’m a small fledgling, you know, network.
Prince EA: Yeah.
Glenn: How are we going to go against the Beyoncés—and I’m not saying they’re leaders of this, but just in that example—how are we going to go against this culture and this tidal wave? How do you survive that?
Prince EA: Very interesting…I honestly believe that deep down through all of the cultural conditioning, a lot of people are missing something in their lives, you know, they’re not truly happy. And what I offered, I mean, my video reached I think 30-something million people in 14 days. I touched something. I touched something within all humans. This transcends age. This transcends race, because I honestly think that that within everyone, that pure love, that pure consciousness, is who we really are, you know? I think that finding out who you really are is the key, and I just offered that.
You know, I didn’t want to necessarily reach that many people. I just threw that video out, and it touched so many people. And I know marketers and Jay-Z would love to have that many hits on some of his, and I’m just a guy in North St. Louis, you know, putting out random videos with my videographer, Brandon Sloan, and that’s what happened. So I think that I touched something, and when you show people that pure love, that pure compassion, they will gravitate towards it.
And I always say, you know, when you compete with no one, no one can compete with you. I’m not trying to go against Jay-Z or Beyoncé. I can only do what I can here, here and now while I’m here, and that’s it.
Glenn: Do you ever get beat down? Do you ever think to yourself this isn’t going to make a difference?
Prince EA: Honestly, I don’t worry about it. I do what I can, and I let go of the result, you know? I used to be neurotic about, you know, how many views will this get? Will this get a good response from people? Now I just let it go. I can only create art out of pure love and compassion and see what happens. So I don’t have those thoughts anymore, you know, if it’s going to be successful, if it’s going to touch people.
Glenn: May I suggest you’re going to see more success than you can possibly imagine? If that is indeed true that you have just let it go, and you’re just doing and following your heart, that’s when people become megastars. That’s when the message really connects. Because I don’t think…you know, you can fake and write evil and bad guys because most people have not seen real genuine evil in their life, you know? So it’s not real personal. But everybody at some point has seen true genuine love, and they can spot a fraud a million miles away. So I just don’t think you can fake this stuff, at least for very long. So what are you doing next?
Prince Ea: I’m continuing to release spoken word videos. I’ve got one releasing on the 29th about technology actually, so I’m excited.
Glenn: What’s your view on technology?
Prince EA: My view on technology? My view is it’s not technology’s fault. It’s our fault at the end of the day. You know, I talk about the loss of connectivity with humans and things like that, but at the end of the day, it’s about our relationship with technology that is the problem. It all comes back to ourselves, you know? It all comes back to how we live, how we react, and are we going to live our lives outwardly or are we going to live an inward existence? Because I believe the inward existence is the most fulfilling.
Glenn: I have to tell you, I don’t know how you vote, I don’t know if you even know who I am or you hate me, like me, I don’t know, but we have a lot in common, my friend, and I am very proud to have you on the show. And I hope to shake your hand someday soon. God bless you.
Prince EA: Thank you so much for having me. God bless you too.
Glenn You bet. Thank you.
