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" Metta World Peace is back. Back to New York City, the place where he played as a kid through the late eighties and into the nineties, then in high school and in college, at St. John&amp;#039;s. Yes, after playing for five different NBA teams since he joined the league in &amp;#039;99, the occasionally volatile and endlessly eccentric basketball player formerly known as Ron Artest has signed a deal with the New York Knicks, and tonight he&amp;#039;ll make his debut at the Garden, only a twenty-minute subway ride from the housing project in Queens in which he grew up. The man has come a long way since then, in many arenas \u2014 aside from his basketball career (including winning defensive player of the year, an All-Star spot, and a championship ring), he&amp;#039;s also had stints as a rapper and a children&amp;#039;s book author. On the occasion of his homecoming, we spoke with World Peace about all of those things: growing up, the hip-hop he loved, and even, yes, the children. ESQUIRE.COM: So tell me about where you grew up. METTA WORLD PEACE: I&amp;#039;m from Queensbridge. It&amp;#039;s the largest housing project in New York. And growing up in Queens, it was different because I wasn&amp;#039;t really experienced in traveling to the City. I never really got used to the City. And man, I don&amp;#039;t know how anyone can afford to live in the City now.  World Peace&amp;#039;s Three Favorite Albums from Queensbridge  Illmatic, Nas &amp;quot;I miss 98% of his songs! And he&amp;#039;s still making them. Yeah, Nas is still doing it.&amp;quot;  Murda Muzik, Mobb Deep &amp;quot;For hip-hop from the &amp;#039;90s, you definitely have to go with Mobb Deep.&amp;quot;  Thug Matrix, Tragedy-Khadafi &amp;quot;A lot of people don&amp;#039;t know him, but he was great.&amp;quot;  ESQ: How do you think it&amp;#039;s changed? MWP: The City now is way different than it was back in &amp;#039;85. Especially in Manhattan. Back then, in the late &amp;#039;80s and early &amp;#039;90s, it was definitely and heavily drug-infested. I can only ever remember how drug-infested it was when I reminisce about it. I remember in my neighborhood, people tried to come together and do good things. But I think a lot of people fed off the fact that we were struggling in my neighborhood and the best way for them to cope was drugs. Most people \u2014 most weak-minded people \u2014 got addicted to drugs, and that effected the families. But now you fast-forward to 2013 and most of those families are dysfunctional and separated and most of the fathers, maybe fifty to sixty percent, are gone and the families are on assistance. For the most part that&amp;#039;s all I remember, but I survived it, and I&amp;#039;m trying to help rehabilitate a lot of those kids. ESQ: What do you think of the kids nowadays? MWP: I think the youth right now are definitely smarter. They were fooled for a little bit, but they&amp;#039;re definitely smarter. I&amp;#039;ve learned a lot from my own kids. Actually, my son was the reason why I got involved in other things outside of basketball. He&amp;#039;s taught me well, and he&amp;#039;s going to school with kids that are more fortunate than I was. My son grew up fortunate. And he&amp;#039;s, like, eleven years old, and he came up to me and said, &amp;quot;Hey Dad, why don&amp;#039;t \u2014 why don&amp;#039;t you have a real estate company?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;What are you talking about?&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t have a real estate company, you know? And he made me \u2014 I thought about it and said, &amp;quot;What the hell is a real estate company?&amp;quot; So my son made me feel so dumb; I was studying \u2014 I had to study all day, reading and reading up on real estate. ESQ: You do seem to like having a variety of projects. MWP: I don&amp;#039;t want to get stuck practicing basketball all day, so that&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m always moving: because I don&amp;#039;t like to be stuck in one mind-frame. It&amp;#039;s not about doing big things, it&amp;#039;s about being effective and efficient. At this point in my life it&amp;#039;s like, How do I continue to build rather than stay still? I think that being a math major [at St. John&amp;#039;s], I see things differently. You never solve one problem; you have to continue to solve them. And I think that&amp;#039;s where I&amp;#039;m at, in that I enjoy this math approach I take to my life, continuing to solve different, new equations. ESQM: What about your own music, are you still doing that? MWP: I still like to give out records out for free. I got maybe a hundred songs or something like that. ESQ: What do you think about music today, compared to what you listened to growing up? MWP: I think hip educational music I miss. I don&amp;#039;t miss \u2014 I&amp;#039;m not a gangsta, uh, hip-hop fan. That&amp;#039;s one thing I&amp;#039;m not. Now I will bop my head to gangsta music, I&amp;#039;m not going to lie. I will bop my head to some Mobb Deep or N.W.A. and all that stuff. I&amp;#039;m not a fan of it. I wish it was not me. But I miss educational music. I miss some of the Tupac songs \u2014 I don&amp;#039;t miss all of the Tupac songs, but I miss some of them. I miss lyrics, like &amp;quot;Dear Mama&amp;quot; where you can be, like, Wow! Those songs, they touched us as kids. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a25472/interview-metta-world-peace-103013/>