I actually started as a singer in Brooklyn, and I lived in a community. To get out of the ghetto of my community, I was a musician.
I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.
I've told the kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; "Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?" After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government.
Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing. . . social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today.
If you walked by a street and you was walking a concrete and you saw a rose growing from concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So way is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how am leaning crooked to the side, u can't even see that I've come up from out of that.
Battery never dies, the ghetto keeps me wise.
Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies. . . . The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.
I am a product of a rat and roach infested black ghetto. It is easy for me to rationalize my dealings as a numbers man. I'll defend men today who are involved in it.
I don't get nothing but love. In every ghetto all over the world. Nothing but love. They respect that I came outta there and I'm doing it the right way. You can't do nothing but respect that.
The ghetto was not only a place of refuge for a persecuted minority but a great experiment in peace, in self-discipline and in humanism. As such it still exists and refuses to give up in spite of all the brutality that surrounds it. I was brought up among those people.
My dad was in the hood, he was a minister, and he would always put churches in the ghetto.
My music is more like ghetto gospel; there's a message in my words, so people listen. Sometimes you might here different things; it depends on how you feel. You might feel down, and I might be the cat in the same sentence saying, "You need to get up and do your thing. " And then I could be the same cat, when you at the top of your game, telling you, "It feel good, don't it?" but with the same words.
It's very easy for one talking about violence and hatred for the white man to appeal to [Negro from ghetto]. I have never thought of this, but I think this is quite true, that if, even if you talk to them about nonviolence from a tactical point of view, they can't quite see it because they don't even know they're outnumbered.
We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.
I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides - but had loving parents.
I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads,. . . I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.
Drugs are so easy to get in the ghetto. They might not be easy to get in nice areas like Beverly Hills, but in Long Beach and Compton and South Central they're easy to get.
I'm a ghetto man who made good. I never forgot where I came from and who put me on top - God and Jack The Rapper.
At Murry Bergtraum [High School] if you were really funny you sat at this table at with all of the funniest dudes, the toughest, the coolest - everybody sat at that table. It was like the ghetto Algonquin Round Table. [Comedy] was my entry, my membership card.
Hip-Hop got turned into Hit Pop, The second a record was number one on the pop charts. But don't skip on the heart, it gotta start in the ghetto, Let no one forget about the hard part.