Quotes About Hip-hop

Nike is obviously more sporty than Adidas. I always associate Adidas with Beastie Boys and Run-DMC.

Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable.

What I particularly liked about Nineties hip hop was it had a certain reverence for the groove that I hadn't been hearing in a while.

Nineties hip-hop in particular really shaped what became the common pop cultural language that we all speak.

Nineties hip-hop was a big influence for me; it still is. I love '90s everything. And it's when I was born, too. I'm a '90s kid for sure.

Sickle cell was my life before hip-hop. I ain't really have no life - that was it.

I got no problem with Nas.

I grew up around hip-hop so I didn't think it was about being cool or being black or being white or whatever.

I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick.

When I first got into the rap game, I had an early dream of unifying rappers.

With me being form the South, I wanted to make this album like a G Unit.

My greatest contribution to hip-hop was allowing the United States of America to know and understand exactly how far they reach, and how influential they are to children in completely different countries because I am the import.

It would be really dangerous for us to assume that Christian hip-hop's popularity equals racial unity.

I have inherited two of the most important brands in hip-hop, Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella. Reid and Universal Music Group have given me the opportunity to manage the companies I have contributed to my whole career. I feel this is a giant step for me and the entire artist community.

I came up playing in both punk rock bands and hip-hop bands, and I found a more universal way of reaching people, especially with music that has a message to it.

The representation of women in hip-hop has long been so flagrantly unkind.

You were cool if you had on a pair of Air Force 1s. It's still a staple for me while on tour.

The only people playing the roles of classic rock stars are hip-hop artists, now. Kanye's stage persona, and the way he approaches making albums, and the way he wants to be better than everyone else? That's reminiscent of Freddie Mercury. That's reminiscent of the Beatles.

You have the core hip-hop, which would just be beats and breaks, more something like what you hear with DJ Premier. Then you get into the more highly produced hip-hop, which is something like what DJ Khaled does. But at some point, it starts to get kind of pop.

Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

The effect hip-hop had on me was enormous. I was exposed to it by happenstance. My father worked at a radio station in New York called WKTU Disco 92. It was the first radio station in New York City to play disco in the late '70s.

R&B stations don't say 'We have old school artist Ronald Isley in the house.' They say 'We have the legendary Ronald Isley.' But if I come do an interview, they're gonna say 'We have old school rapper Big Daddy Kane in the house.' We belittle ourselves, our music and our culture. It's hard for a lot of legendary artists in hip-hop to overcome.

No, I'll stay Ice-T. This is what got me here, I'm always going to stay true to that. If it weren't for hip-hop I wouldn't be doing all these other things.

Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.