Multi-talented entertainer Bow Wow said he struggled for years over choosing between his two loves, rapping and acting. After a decade in the game, eight albums and numerous starring roles on the silver screen, the 24-year-old talent finally made a decision: both. 

“I just realized this not too long ago that when I dropped my first album I did my first movie a year later,” Bow Wow told BET.com backstage at Australia's Supafest 2011 this past weekend. “So I’ve been doing them both really simultaneously my entire career.”

The Young Money spitter says he came to this decision because of advice from two of his mentors, Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg.

“Ice Cube gave me like the illest advice,” Bow Wow recalled. “I came to him and told him, ‘Yo do people ask you all the time, Rapping or acting? What do you say?’ He go ‘rap’ and he told me, ‘If I could still do it, you could still do it. You 24. You talking about retiring? Is you stupid?’” 

As previously reported, Bow Wow and Ice Cube, who worked together most recently in the film Lottery Ticket, are partnering up for an upcoming television sitcom. 

Bow Weezy also got some solid advice from the other famed West Coast legend.

“Then Snoop told me the same thing,” recalls Bow Wow. “‘As long as you got catalog you can tour forever. You don’t even gotta put out an album Bow. You got eight albums already. You can tour forever, with no singles. Trust me.’ And when he told me that I said, ‘OK. I’ll be rapping til I’m 42 then.'”

Bow Wow, nee’ Shad Moss, will star in Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family, which debuts in theaters April 22. The rapper’s next album, Underrated, is expected to drop next year. It’ll be Bow Wow’s first release on Young Money/Cash Money Records.

(Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)