Quotes About Hip-hop

Hip-hop has had this history where the predecessor just is so harsh and not nice to the next coming generation that it creates this separation and this gap.

I grew up looking up to DJ Premier, who would have the illest hip-hop joint on everybody's album.

Premier came into the picture when were starting to make our own beats and all that.

You'll be fooled if you only get your hip-hop from the mainstream, you know. The things that move people are not just found in the mainstream cultures. And when we talk about hip-hop in general, hip-hop's basically preoccupied with life.

LL Cool J is a huge presence. He is a music mogul. He brings that experience and that life into the room.

Everything I do is in a New York state of mind. I'm indebted to preserving the sound of the city.

Hip-hop is not about pretense. You can be missing an eye; you can have an ice-cream cone in your face; you can run around with Bantu knots; you can decide to wear gold, all everything. It's not about how you look - it's about what you say. It's about what message you're getting across.

I see hip-hop as going in a self-managing place. It's very culturally controlled and artist-controlled. It's not really based on a label anymore. Everything is pretty much in the control of the artist. Which is amazing.

My default is e-40 because there's no one else in the world who raps like him. I've always loved e-40.

I'm not going to degrade women, and that's very anti-hip-hop.

Tap's foundation is jazz, just like hip-hop, so relating tap-dancing to rap is natural for me.

Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you're always going to find a hip-hop tape; that's all I buy, that's all I live, that's all I listen to, that's all I love.

Jaden Smith is a good friend of mine. We've got that song that just dropped on the 'Rich Forever II' tape, and we got a couple other songs that we have in the cut.

I had one of those tape players with a strap on it and the orange button - the old-school recorder - and I'd record songs by Roxanne Shante, Run-D.M.C. and Biz, Markie. I'd try and learn the words. I've been rhyming since I was a young fella. I used to win talent shows by break dancing and rapping.

In the early '90s, my cousin gave me a Snoop Dogg cassette tape, and the rawness of the lyrics were something new to me.

I grew up in New York City in the '80s, and it was the epicenter of hip-hop. There was no Internet. Cable television wasn't as broad. I would listen to the radio, hear cars pass by playing a song, or tape songs off of the radio. At that time, there was such an excitement around hip-hop music.

When I put out my first mixtape, '50 Cent is the Future,' it was the first tape where an artist did the entire tape in song format.

I'm one of those cats who could listen to Public Enemy and then pop that out and throw an NWA tape in there.

I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats.

My rap name as a kid was Big Tasty.

People can look to me as a teacher, but I consider myself a student of hip-hop.

I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn't have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling... I'm the most sampled artist in history.

When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst.

50 Cent is a master player at power, a kind of hip-hop Napoleon Bonaparte.