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Next, I focused on how people acted on TV, and I tried to act and communicate like they did. I’ve always been a sponge—a big sponge soaking up everything thatI’m exposed to and somehow making it my own in the process. There have been many times in my life when I have come across as rude to the people around me just because my focus can get so intense when I’m watching or listening to something. I don’t mean it that way. Please don’t blame me for it—it’s who I am. For better and for worse, I am a true product of pop culture.
    In retrospect, I think a lot of people use television and the radio to shut life out, but as a child, I did precisely the opposite. For me, music and then television were my windows into what a better life could potentially sound or look like. Sometimes they were the only windows I could see through. I learned to speak well by watching the characters I loved on TV just as I learned how to sing from all the men on the radio. But what I learned from the songs I heard and the shows I watched went way beyond that. They taught me about walking and talking—the rhythm of life, which if you think about it is very percussive. Everything I heard on the radio and saw on TV became the music of my mind that I’m still listening to closely. I’m always thinking in circles and patterns, and cursive calligraphy. I always see these beautiful things in my mind—like my life is one long-running TV show with a fiercely moving theme song that I’m still writing.
    I love great TV theme songs. I especially loved the
Soap
theme, and of course there were more famous theme songs like
Sanford & Son
’s, for which the all-time genius Quincy Jones was responsible. I just found out recently that Quincy did
Ironside
too—and I loved that one. Notlong ago, I was talking about great TV shows with my country
Voice
buddy Blake Shelton and for some reason he asked me if I remembered
Benson
. I immediately began singing the theme song from memory because those old shows hit very deep with me. They weren’t just sitcoms to me—they were life; they were an escape and an alternate reality that seemed a little more predictable and stable than my own.

Big Gipp: I grew up in neighborhood where Jean Carne lived. She was one of the biggest seventies’ stars. In Atlanta in that time, you had Gladys Knight, Jean Carne, Peabo Bryson, all these soul stars of the seventies. They would shop at the mall on Saturdays with no bodyguards, not like today. We saw all the wrestling stars too. We never thought of it as “us” and “them.” It was “we,” all mixed together. It helped with building the scene at the time.
    In the eighties there were only a few record labels, and most music was local. We didn’t really turn into a real music city until the nineties, when L.A. Reid and Babyface came to town. It changed the city, and the attitude of people who wanted to be in music. All of a sudden Whitney Houston showed up in Atlanta, and Bobby Brown was around. And now we were seeing actual stars and artists doing it—right now. So we felt like—hey, this is our time! We thought, we don’t have to make music for the locals anymore, let’s make music for everybody. All of us were coming up together—the girls in TLC lived down the street from me all their lives. Rico Wade stayed up the street. Dallas Austin was the first breakout star from Atlanta, leaving school at sixteen and moving to Los Angeles. It was like,
Yo
! We got actual people that we grew up with who are makingactual waves in the music business! So it helped with us formulating who we wanted to be. Dallas came first, then came Jermaine Dupri. His father was a big rap promoter and brought Fresh Prince and some New York acts to Atlanta. So we saw the best. But because we were raised to think for ourselves, when our generation started making music, we never just followed what other artists were doing. I feel like it’s where we come from that makes us go to the studio