- T.I. talks redemption, remorse and reinvention for MTV
In MTV’s “T.I.’s Road to Redemption, 45 Days to Go”, the rapper intervenes in someone’s life who might be going down the wrong road, and he tries to set them straight.
T.I. finds redemption in this process for himself and shows viewers what choices – good and bad - and the subsequent consequences - either open the doors or limit life’s possibilities for the people involved in this MTV project.
T.I. spoke to Monsters and Critics at the TCA’s and noted his music was a reflection of his life experience.
“My music has always reflected my experiences, both good and bad, past and present. I don’t think that I can help but to reflect the thing that I’ve learned from my experiences in all of my music whether it is a song like ‘Live Your Life’ “Dead and Gone’ or one of my past songs like ‘24’s’. It’s all a reflection."
When he was asked why he was buying all the machine guns and silencers, T.I. became pensive. “Well, there’s a very lengthy explanation. It has been publicized so many times in the past year and a half or so, and do you know what? The series goes into extreme detail as to why. To put it in few words, I made terrible choices due to a sense of paranoia, and lack of thought. I wasn’t thinking as much as I ought to have been.”
T.I. elaborated on what he meant by “terrible choices”.
“Terrible choices because I chose to do the wrong thing rather than do the right thing. I don’t think that…I think the best thing that probably could have ever happened to me was to get caught. Because, I had gotten away with it. I don’t know what other terrible choices I would have made afterwards. So I think to have been able to face my terrible choices earlier on as possible was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
When Producer Michael Hirschorn first met T.I., he was in house arrest at his Atlanta mansion. He was under house arrest for seven months and as Hirschorn described it at the recent winter TCA’s; he was “completely by himself, roaming about the mansion.”
Hirschorn described the feel of the scene as a “profound moment” and a “karma reckoning” for the rapper, whose past had come back to haunt him. Hirschorn became excited at the idea of televising the personal transformation and journey showing how T.I. would be righting the mistakes of his past.
T.I. spoke of his outlook on the entire series. “I approach matters that most adults would consider kind of uncomfortable speaking about with younger kids. I approach it from a perspective that teenagers probably haven’t thought of before. I think it comes from me being in their shoes at one time and remembering how I felt, what I was thinking."
"This show is not part of my thousand hours of community service hours that I must complete before March. I have 864 hours to date that I have done outside of this show. This show is in addition to. This is something that I wanted to do, to reach teens... as many as possible."
"T.I’s Road To Redemption: 45 Days To Go" premiered Tuesday, February 10 at 9 PM ET on MTV. Future episodes will air at their regularly scheduled time of 9:30 pm ET.
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