"Waka was a bright-a** kid. Bright as h*ll. Honors. The sh*t that get me about him is that he does this language sh*t that he do. He's from New York. Yeah, he was here since a kid, but he's different from all the rest of my kids. If you hear the way he talk [compared] to everybody else, you know they come from
New York. But [Waka] adapted everything about the South; he really do know here better than he know up there. He was a bright-a** kid. And then he just went astray." (VIBE)
She also revealed what Flocka's back-up plan was if rap did not pan out.
"If Waka wasn't doing this, he was supposed to be doing ball. He was being scouted for ball. He stopped playing ball, he stopped doing everything. And he became this freaking kid that was from hell. He just went left field, he didn't care about nothing. Nothing. He didn't care about nothing and nobody after that happened with my son. He became so angry it was pathetic. You don't understand: I mean, teachers, principals, coaches--everybody was coming for him to try to get him. Waka was bright. School was everything to him." (VIBE)
Last month, Flocka talked about being influenced by Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli and dumbing down his rap image.
"Tupac introduced me to the [writing] of Machiavelli," Waka said in an interview referring to Pac's moniker, Mavakeli. "That's why I made that. I can't just, 'Oh, Tupac did that, so I'm gonna do that too.' If people read, they would love that man. That man is a mind-game genius. I read the Machiavelli war-tactic books, his biography, everything. That man is just like sticks and stones, bad. You see Waka Flocka, what do you think? Negativity. You read Machiavelli? Negativity. My brain, I'm so sharp, I can play stupid on the camera and they think I'm dumb. So really. you just playing yourself. I'm so ahead of y'all. That's for the bloggers."