There are so many different musicians I look up to for different reasons - from hip-hop to rock to pop. Some are Alanis Morissette, Michael Jackson, Aerosmith, Pink, Avril Lavigne, Beyoncé, Lil Wayne.
I'm mostly concentrating now on continuing to make history in Hip-Hop, making everybody proud of me, I'm not just a rapper now, I'm in history now.
I do think that some bands seem to be dabbling in the rock-hip-hop world and are not necessarily serious about it.
Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.
Hip-hop is about tearing down the system to better it, tearing down the system to better themselves. No matter how flimsy it might seem, they always wanted the finer things in life.
I don't even listen to hip-hop anymore. All my friends are white and over 40.
When I met you it was magic. . . We polar opposites, but attracted like we was magnets.
Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.
We need to look beyond the obvious. Yes, there are minstrel images in hip-hop. Yes, there are demeaning, anti-racist, misogynistic and homophobic representations. We could make the same case about the church and our government. But hip-hop, like society, isn't one dimensional.
All of a sudden it became that hip hop didn't used to be about partying; hip hop used to be about putting out a message.
I`m lucky in that in my character in hip hop is me. I`m Michael Render. My character is Killer Mike. But the truth that I sing in my raps align themselves with the policy of Bernie Sanders.
Hip-hop and R&B are especially fertile bases of collaboration. It always makes good records and good music.
The hip-hop community is made up of a lot of hustlers. Everybody is trying to get theirs, and everybody is trying to eat.
This treadmill lifestyle ain't workin for me. . . It's from ya crib to ya lab to ya job to make a profit, And at the day's end you still got nothing accomplished.
There are all the offsprings of people who are influenced by punk. It sounds completely different - but it's still rock 'n' roll. When hip-hop came on the scene, it was the last legitimate creation of a new genre.
If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
Hip-hop was my first audience - I would rap in the mirror, walk down the street and listen to my Walkman.
Earnestness can go wrong in hip hop. On this album, it goes very right.
I've sort of realized there's a definite pattern to my output at this point: there's an album that everybody sort of loves, that's a real balance between the old and new, like The Dreamer or No Beginning No End, like a blend of jazz and hip-hop, or r&b and soul and hip-hop.
Everyone has an addiction, mine happens to be you.
