Hip hop is at its essence a folk music, because it speaks the language that people are still speaking at ground zero, it speaks the language that people speak on the streets.
If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
It's not about what you get out but what you put into hip hop as a genre.
Being in this game if you are gonna sell drugs and make records too then as many records you make is gonna be as many people that know you sell drugs. We got the hip hop cops listening now.
[My ideal] is being able to be outdoors, have a labor intensive life, and then have this other life, where I hop on a plane and go sing to people in Norway.
Hip Hop can be a very powerful weapon to help expand young people's political and social consciousness. But just as with any weapon, if you don't know how to use it, if you don't know where to point it, or what you're using it for, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot or killing your sisters or brothers.
If you are successful because of Hip Hop, which I am, then you have to recognize that Hip Hop is nothing if not a product of the street, therefore you have to give something back.
When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.
You gotta be happy when you wake up in the morning and look at what's next to ya. You wanna just hop on it again. That's how I feel. That's what life is about. Because when you leave the house, it's all misery anyway.
Detroit is right now a new Mecca for Hip Hop.
I keep waiting to be invited to the hip hop party, I've never been. So if there's anyone out there who is having a hip hop party, I'd like to come.
It's like a paradox. For one side, being popularized rap got better and the other side of it got worse. It's very pop and it's very different now. When you make it as pop and as soft as it is, it lacks its integrity. It lacks its accountability. It lacks a lot of other things that came from that dangerous time in hip hop.
I just kind of assumed that you do a movie and then you leave and you hop onto the next thing. I never thought that people are actually buddies.
More than half of all the hip hop record sales are white people, and I think that might be a result of my record helping people to accept hip hop.
Dear Hip Hop, we can't scream 'murder, misogyny, lawlessness' in our music & then turn around and ask for equality & justice.
Hip hop is the new rock n' roll, you know what I mean? And anybody who doesn't think that is just sort of living in the past. It's all just American music, really, when you get right down to it.
I just like to hop up on the dance floor and do my thing.
We wound up taking my enterprise inside marketing, branding, management, finances. We went in there [Sisterhood of Hip Hop show] and taught them a little bit about everything in hopes of them being able to have some takeaways that they'd be able to use in the future for their own careers. And I think we were pretty successful.
There is still consciousness in hip hop.
If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.