Quotes About Hip-hop

Honestly, I started playing the pause game right after the 2015 BET Hip Hop Awards cypher. That's around when pauses really started.

I'm used to being respected for what I do, and I've watched as my peers - Doug E. Fresh, MC Lyte - do the same thing and I remember the ones before me - LL, Run-DMC - how it was for them. I think we were able to achieve what we achieved because we watched the generation before us.

I was part of a hip-hop group called Fly Style. I was one of two white girls, and I was part of the younger company, which was called Touch of Style. And it was amazing. It gave me a different perception of dance and beauty because the other girls were mostly African-American and Latina.

Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.

Dre is someone I've looked up to since 1985 when he came to my college and performed with The Wrecking Crew.

The head-banging music gives me a headache. Katy Perry is fun, Rihanna, old-school '90s hip-hop. Salt-N-Pepa. I like listening to that. Get the nerves out before the games.

We used to talk about wanting to get some money, but that's when hip-hop was based on your dreams and your fantasy. The whole thing now is the dreams and fantasies were achieved, and you don't want to make it the focal point. You can't keep beating that dead horse.

I heard Q-Tip on the Jungle Brothers' song 'The Promo.' It was very exciting. It was very new. The music and the culture around hip-hop was evolving. I think there's an emotional quality to their music and there's a vulnerability to the music. For me, A Tribe Called Quest was my Beatles.

I knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.

I think one of the reasons I've had success in hip-hop is that I can bring out vulnerability in people who are generally seen as tough guys. To me, when a hip-hop musician always plays tough, I find it annoying because I know they're not really like that - there's something deeper and vulnerable. There has to be, because they're human beings.

The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.

There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.

I was called Kool Dj Kurt Walker... but they wanted tocall me Kurtis Blow.

I like to compare the attitude and energy of an emerging start-up to that of the early hip-hop era. From working at labels like Bad Boy and Ruff Ryders, walking into the Def Jam offices, A Touch of Jazz and things like that, the vibe is that off making something out of nothing and making things work, and that's what I love about start-ups.

DJ Premier, this guy is like a god, a walking god. Guru, he put it down legendary.

When I graduated, I was going to go to school for law, but had such an affinity for hip-hop. It was like walking into a casino and I decided to bet everything on hip-hop, and I hit! My hit wasn't just a hit for me, it was a hit for everyone in this culture.

I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.

My friends put me on to Mobb Deep when I was a little kid. I've always been a big fan.

If a hip-hop artist can get on stage and entertain an arena full of 30,000 people and keep their attention for 45 minutes, imagine that on a big screen.

I had to tell the city that 2Pac passed, and I had to be on the radio early after Biggie passed. Those were awful, emotional.

I listen to a lot of Biggie, he's so lyrical.

With 'Ready to Die,' that was some of the most honest rhymes of all-time. There's some real dark material on there that Biggie was going through.

For me, I put Mac Dre right up there with Biggie and 'Pac as legends who have since passed on.

When I first got to Los Angeles, hip-hop music was a scary thing not only to white America but to middle-class black America.