After facing mounting backlash over his comments about Hip-Hop's founding artists being "broke and dusty," including an eloquent, passionate response from LL COOL J, Akademiks has clarified some of his remarks.

“Essentially, people are taking a 30 or 40 or 50 or 60-second clip out of me streaming for five hours," he explained on The Breakfast Club (via Ambrosia for Heads). "And I’m talkin’ about all type of things, I’m breaking things down, I’m having a full in-depth conversation, full of context ... When you have to talk to a crowd or talk to any audience live for four or five hours—and you’ve got to be entertaining, you’ve got some jokes in there, you’ve got some tongue-in-cheek comments, and those are the shit [the media] is only focusing on, no one wants to talk about nothing actually solid. ‘Yo, he said all the OGs are broke and dusty!’ I ain’t say that.”

He went on to admit that calling people "broke and dusty" could've been triggering.

“The ‘broke and dusty’ thing, it’s triggering," he said. "It seems very—actually, it is very disrespectful,” he admitted. “I wasn’t talking about everybody. LL [Cool J] responded, and I wanna salute LL. I think everything he said was right. So let me put that out on the table. I agree 100% with everything he said. However, 80% of what he said wasn’t focused on what I was saying. Because he got off-center. He said, you’re equating money to contribution and respect all that. That's what I was saying. That’s not what I was saying at all! I’m never questioning the contribution or not appreciating the contribution of anyone who came before me. And I’m never saying that money is the only thing that validates that contribution.”

Akademiks also acknowledged LL's points about there being no managers or even labels who believed in Hip-Hop in the early days, making financial prosperity far-fetched. “I thought you asked a valid question, and the valid question is: if you invented Hip-Hop, if you’re one of the founders of Hip-Hop, why are you not financially well-off?" he questioned. "Now we know LL answered that, and he gave some great reasons. So the next thing to me is, how do we make sure these founding fathers are taken care of, financially?”

You can watch the interview in its entirety above.