Quotes About Hip-hop

Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.

I'm forever learning and that's why I'm always able to create new styles and new dimensions of hip-hop.

I always thought that there was something in hip-hop culture that was the misfit of all the musical styles, where they didn't really belong. They're kind of like, 'No, we're a real culture! We're not going anywhere, you can't get rid of us!' I really liked that there was a rebelliousness about it. I connected with that.

I think a lot of guys are influenced by 'Pinata.' I fathered a lot of styles off that album.

I have been training under Melvin Louis and Dimple Kotecha. They're very different people and their styles and training procedures are also different. Melvin is more into the improvised version, he mixes hip-hop, street style, Bollywood etc. He is more into the madness and gives me the freedom to try my own thing.

When I started making music, I was so heavy into the hyphy movement. That's something you only know so much about if you were right there living in it, submerged in the culture.

Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.

Everybody raps. We rap to make money. We do business. Ain't no other record company out there that sold as many records as we did.

Would the Element be a car for people who like hip-hop, or for people waiting for a hip-op?

Everything I did on the 'Paid in Full' album and those first three albums, I wrote everything right in the studio.

To me, one of the greatest albums I ever put out was the album I did with Statik Selektah.

NWA was all-American; Wu-Tang was all-American. It was just a part of America you may not have seen at the time.

If you know Down South production, Roland 808 is in almost everything.

When 'And Then What' was made, Jeezy already had a street appeal, but 'And Then What' put him on the national appeal.

We did the Dope Jam tour in the spring and summer of 1988—besides me, it was Biz Markie, Boogie Down Productions, Doug E. Fresh, Kool Moe Dee, and Eric

B. & Rakim. Then straight after that we did the Bring the Noise tour with Public Enemy, N.W.A, and EPMD. "Colors" was always my opening song.

I did a few opening-act gigs at United Nations and Water the Bush. I opened up for Digital Underground when they came to L.A. and

Long before we ever heard about hip-hop in L.A., I was writing rhymes. It

into the life of crime and made it real to me. I went everywhere with his books, idolizing him. A lot of people don't know this, but in 1976 Iceberg recorded an album called Reflections, which had a lot of slick rhyming. I used to spit his words back verbatim. The gangbangers used to constantly say, "Yo, kick

I was switching up my lyrical style, but I wasn't expecting the impact that one B side was going to have, that it would pretty much transform the hip-hop sound of the West Coast and give birth to an entire genre called gangsta rap.

With 'LilDurk2x,' it's a good vibe to it, good energy.

I like golden-era hip-hop because they were recording on a 2-inch tape. There was dirty, raw sampling. It's nasty. It has a vibe to it.

We have this really retro vibe and style of songwriting and, personally, I wasn't embracing the current state of music until I fell in love with hip-hop. It felt good to suddenly embrace where music was headed, and I think hip-hop is the best at that, because it feels so progressive and everybody wants to be the best.

The vibe on 'Starboy' comes from that hip-hop culture of braggadocio, from Wu-Tang and 50 Cent, the kind of music I listened to as a kid.