Quotes from Rakim

You come up, you love music, and then business interferes.

I love what I live, and I live Islam, so I applied it to everything I do. I applied it to my rhymes, and I felt that I wanted the people to know what I knew.

As a young artist, especially in rap and at that time that I came out, originality was big.

The young kids out there doing their thing, I can't knock them.

When you listen to old-school music, you can smell your mother's food in the kitchen. You can feel where you was when you first heard that song. That's what's beautiful about music. It's for everyone, but we all have individual memories that make us love it.

I love to see when people are real passionate about what they feel and what they say.

My whole thing is if it wasn't for people like ya'll and people like them I wouldn't be me. I love every minute of it.

I try to make my flow sound like a John Coltrane solo.

Whenever I sat down to write something it was never anything I took lightly. It was something that I'd want you, somebody in Japan, and somebody [over there to hear it].

Sometimes I see where I want to take the song and wind up at the end and come back to the beginning. I don't miss nothing and everything is good. Everything I thought of is incorporated in it.

You gotta let the fans shine their glory the way they want. It's like I have a million bosses and my job is to make them happy.

I was heavily influenced by Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, Grandmaster Caz, but I kind of wanted to take it somewhere else.

People always tell me that they grew up with me - like I'm their brother or uncle or some other family member. That keeps me going.

I was an underground artist, but the underground status was successful. Coming from where I came from to see where rap is now, now artists are selling from a million to eight million copies.

When you look at hip-hop, I want to do that: to spit fire and take our best from the ashes to build our kingdom; to recognize all the regional styles, conscious lyrics, the tracks, underground, mainstream, the way we treat each other. Lose the garbage and rebuild our scene.

To know that I was being heard on the radio, it made me feel as if I was, I guess, spread across New York. It was incredible.

I'm a fan of Jay-Z, from the negotiating table to the booth.

Being a new artist, I was trying to make a good album and hope that people like Kool Moe Dee and Melle Mel and some of the firstborns appreciated it. I was being influenced by them brothers there. That's where I got my start and my first listen.

No Doubt is one of the groups that I think everybody listens to, man, and everybody loves Gwen Stefani.

I try to stay true to my style, and I understand the foundation of my style and where it came from. But at the same time, you take that experience and learn different ways to write, different ways to turn on that creative energy.

I'm not a mainstream artist. But I've seen my kids being born; I've seen them take their first steps, I've seen them grow up and start school. That's worth more to me than any umpteen million dollars.

As I grew up, a lot of the music was made to uplift the spirit.

I don't work out too much. I just do some pushups when I feel the right hook is getting a lil weak.

I stick to my guns - that's what keeps me going as an artist. Stevie Wonder never changed from what he wanted to do, and each new album that came along was dope.