Top 133 Rapping Quotes

I am hoping to improve my writing and rapping, as well as get a better grasp on how to make beats and music that complements what I do vocally. It’s a learning process that hopefully won’t end.

When you listen to records like ‘Foreclosure,’ that’s like me sitting in a room by myself just rapping about things that’s running across my mind and things that have been bothering me.

I had to work a lot. I was doing YouTube videos, but I wasn’t getting a lot of love. How do I make a living off rapping when no one knows me? I got kind of discouraged. But hard work shuts people up.

Rapping was a hobby; when I went to college, there were a ton of dudes rapping. I think that’s where I got my rapping chops up.

That’s what my music… I’m working on a solo record right now, it’s gonna be more hip-hop than anything, like electronic hip-hop, futuristic hip-hop. I’m probably gonna be rapping on it.

The most popular rap artists aren’t supposed to be rapping about being broke.

My own rapping skills are quite good, actually. You get this thing, I think it’s called Songify or AutoRap, and you talk into them, and they auto-tune it and make it into a quite interesting musical number. And I got one where it builds it into a rap.

I started rapping since, like, 14. But I’ve been obsessed with rap from when I was 11. I heard ‘Baby Don’t Cry,’ I’ll never forget.

I’m thinking of the kids of the next generation and the music that they need to hear. Before, I was just rapping to rap. Now, I’m rapping to change the world.

As far as rapping goes, as long as you are telling the truth and you have a good flow, then you win.

When I was 16, I was rapping just to rap.

When we were growing up, I got kicked out of Timbaland’s house every day. He was the DJ for my brother’s rap group in junior high school. So I was 7, and while Tim’s DJ’ing and my brother’s rapping, I’d be upstairs dancing.

50 Cent should stick to what he does best, rapping, and leave the funny business to comedians.

I didn’t know of any rappers in Charlotte. Not to sound like I’m bragging, but I brought the music scene alive and shed the proper light on it. I took it to a whole other level when I started rapping.

I started rapping when I was young, like 12, 11. But I wasn’t really talking about nothing and it didn’t really get me nowhere.

I know a beat is good for me when I can just start rapping. It’s usually hard for me to do that.

Rapping just gave me something to do versus the streets.

I hadn’t done much rapping in a while. I really wasn’t sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn’t really required of me.

My come-out record, ’10 Day,’ was the thing people were supposed to hear and figure out ‘he’s good’ or ‘he’s not good.’ ‘Acid Rap’ is the comeback tape, and it asks way bigger and better questions than, ‘Is he good at rapping?’

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.

Nothing I do is ever void of melody. I know it might seem like I’m doing a lot of rapping, but I’m always utilizing tone and trying to find a key signature. So, I don’t look at myself as a rapper.

At the beginning I wasn’t really rapping. I had poetry, so it was a spoken word vibe. Then I found beats that you could sing over – lo-fi, ambient stuff. So I was singing over them and trying to put things into practice.

I really want to do the unexpected, and I think that’s what I did when I executed ‘Long.Live.A$AP.’ I wanted people to really see the message and that I’m an artist who not only has the capability of rapping, but of composing great music both for people of my generation and for people with different backgrounds.

I feel like, O.K., if I can make it as a singer, then let me try rapping. If I can make it as a rapper, then let me try writing. All right? If I make it as a rap singer and writer, then why not try to produce? I don’t feel limited in any way.

I had been introduced to rapping in a way where women and people did it, it was structured. It had this very very political structure to it and if you didn’t follow the structure, you weren’t considered validated or real and that just gave me anxiety.

When I was in south Sudan, people used to rap in my village. But the rapping was more in the mother tongue, Nuer.

I’ve been rapping on some crunk beats and getting down on the South music for years. I feel like I can do it all.

When I started rapping, I was like, I’ma change my name before I become famous. And that didn’t happen. I didn’t have time.

When I first started rapping, I was just doing it for the hood to notice me – the hood fame – just to get people’s attention around the city, to make me a little show money. But then music became my passion, it got real serious.

I would say Tupac influenced me the most to start rapping, but as far as a female icon that I’ve looked up to since I was six or seven is definitely Gwen Stefani.

In order to maintain your longevity, you have to know the business. It’s not about just rapping and performing.

I started rapping because my mom died when I was about 11 years old, and I was a very rebellious kid. I’ve been kicked out of every school I’ve ever been in since 6th grade on, expelled and dropped out in the 11th grade. Music was the only thing that I could really use to express myself, so I started rapping.

I’m rapping in English but in an African way. I’m not trying to sound like an American.

When I’m not longer rapping, I want to open up an ice cream parlor and call myself Scoop Dogg.

I was, like, 12 or 13; the first hip hop song I tried to rapping to was Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop,’ and my English was so bad, but learning to rap to different songs really helped me with my pronunciation, and looking at the lyrics on Rap Genius and stuff like that.

Early on, it was real tough for me to stick to my guns and say ‘I’m retired, I’m not rapping, don’t ask me for nothing.’ But I had to do that because I love rapping and I love music, so if I don’t do that, you can’t be halfway in it and halfway out.

If you tell somebody that you make music they’re all interested. But when you say you rap, they just start rolling their eyes at you. It would’ve taken me a lot longer to get my foot in the door if I’d continued rapping all the way.

I was rapping at eight.

There’s been lots of theater that uses hip-hop in it, but more often than not, it’s used as a joke – isn’t it hilarious that these characters are rapping. I treat it as a musical form, and a musical form that allows you to pack in a ton of lyric.

Rapping was kind of hard. It’s so many words. When you sing you can kind of stretch the words out. I didn’t have to write as much as everybody else.

Well, I’ve been rapping for a long time.

Me and my dad used to go to these jam sessions and open mic nights, but I was always scared of singing on stage. It felt different to rapping – more pressured.

I love performing, rapping; I love people recognizing my talent.

I knew I could rap a little bit, which is not the most unique way for being funny. The more I did it, the better I got at rapping, and then I fell in love with the craft of it, and the possibility that I was a good rapper was very intriguing.

I used to do design before I was actually rapping. I went to art and design high school.

There was this hip-hop collective called People Crew. And at the time in Korea, there was no real place to access rap music. So People Crew used to host this summer school program, which taught rapping and dancing. I begged my mom to attend that school to learn how to rap.

Once I started rapping, I had to start dancing more. I had to really use my craft, and take everything I did for fun and put it into my professional shows.

I’ve been rapping since I was 18 years old, with a crew called Blades.

If you’re a black kid from the streets and somebody is rapping about parents not understanding, you’d laugh at that.

I grew up listening to T-Pain and The-Dream, and they were doing that thing, rapping and singing at the same time. That’s where I get it from.

I try to make music, all kinds of music, whether it be singing or rapping.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been rapping.

I don’t take anything for granted. I know there are a million and one dudes who are rapping, wishing they were in my shoes.

Historically, hip-hop is about a generation of artists rapping about the realities they see in their neighborhoods or the ‘truths’ they hear growing up in their homes.

When you get older, you try to get what you wanted as a kid. Maybe you wanted an arcade in your house or Q-Tip rapping on your beats.

I think somewhere along the way I realized, ‘O.K., no one’s gonna care about a chubby Jewish dude rapping.’ I realized I’d be better behind the scenes.

I always loved music, and really, I’ve been rapping since I was, like, 12.

Rapping gave me confidence. I got asked to do talent shows and I came up out of my shyness that way. My name was Xperteez back then.

Middle school is when I got super obsessed with battle rapping.

The song that’s affected me the most profoundly is probably Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ or, more specifically, the couple seconds of instrumental break before Vincent Price starts ‘rapping.’

My parents are both into music. My mom sings and my dad plays piano, so there was always music everywhere. I was singing at a very young age, but I actually got my buzz through rapping.

Myself, I’m just a simple country boy who spent time on the streets and developed a style of writing and rapping and a cool sound that people seem to enjoy.

When I was 11, I decided to start rapping, playing guitar, and writing songs. Everything really blossomed from there.

Toasting is basically what you call rapping. It came off of playing the beats at the parties, however it be. You find a space in the beat, and you have somebody live just basically saying rhymes over the beat.

I secured Big Jam through my buzz in the city. My name got bigger and bigger throughout my 1st year of rapping.

When I was just straight-up rapping, I feel like everyone wasn’t paying attention as much, but the moment I started singing – case in point, ‘Clout Cobain’ – it affected more people.

You don’t have a lot of women doing things for women, so when I’m rapping I gotta talk all this mess so the women can feel as confident and empowered as the men.

I started rapping before anybody had ever bought a car from it. It was truly about the art form and the culture, more so than now, where it’s a successful way to make money. Back then you had to be doing it because you liked it.

It’s our approach to treat each show like an arena show. We over-invest in production to make the stage look bigger, turning the show into an experience and not just somebody standing around with a microphone rapping.

I’m influenced by like, 50 Cent and Chief Keef ’cause they were rapping about the same things I was living.

I was a rapper. The reason I stopped rapping was because I realized that people wanted guys like Puff Daddy. That’s not what I do. I quit. That was it. I had to sacrifice for my choice. I said, ‘Forget it. I’ll be a producer.’ Nobody was going to make me do anything.

I was rapping because there were so many things that I wanted to say. There weren’t enough words for me to articulate all of the things that I wanted to say in a three minute song.

When I first started rapping, I was like, ‘I’m gonna be, like, the female Eminem.’

When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, ‘You should switch this over to rapping.’ I went home and did that – started putting my poems over rap.

It’s really important for me to show kids that there are other ways to get rich beyond rapping.

A friend of mine encouraged me to try rapping, so I started experimenting with it, writing verses, seeing if I could fit an extra word or syllable into each line without tripping myself up.

What I don’t do is try to like become whoever I’m rapping with. The people who go get an LL album want to hear LL.

Styles move too fast to be partial to anything. If it’s funk, that’s enough for me. I don’t care how fast or slow it is. I got my grandkids up front rapping and doing the new thing. They’re teaching each other, bringing us up to date.

If it wasn’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t be here. I’d probably be rapping, but I wouldn’t be well known if it wasn’t for the Internet.

I love rapping. I do. My styling’s similar to Missy Elliott – I think she’s so dope. In a weird way, that’s how I first learned the American accent: doing American rap songs.

My biggest influence is Tupac. He was a poet, and listening to Tupac is what inspired me to start rapping.

I was rapping as a hobby. It was something I did for my friends and just played around on ideas and stuff like that.

Rapping was a joke, but the music helped me break out of my shell.

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people’s entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.

I started rapping when I was 18-19.

I started rapping when I was about 12 or 13, just playing around with it.

When you’re a college student interested in music, you hear all these rappers talking about dropping out. For me, when I heard someone like J. Cole rapping about school and staying in school…it inspired me to keep going.

I remember hearing Will Smith, back when he was just a rapper, saying, ‘When all the other rap stars are in bed, I’m practicing my rapping.’ I try to be like that. There is always something to improve.

I’ve never been the straight rapper that is going to stand in a cipher and battle all day. I started off battle rapping, but to me, making songs became more important than freestyles… I’ve met many rappers who can freestyle but can’t make a record.

I was 17 when I first started rapping and 18 before I started taking it seriously – when I really knew I could rap and have fans and be a trendsetter.

Rapping can be repetition sometimes. Sometimes you gotta highlight your words in a certain kind of way. So I always was a fan of sing-rapping. It was always funny to me a little bit, and I think that being funny and being able to laugh, even at yourself, is a form of flattery.

I was like 13, 14 years old. I had a Rock Band mic, and I used to record music and put it on YouTube and DatPiff. Then I started getting to producing my own music because I didn’t want to keep rapping on beats I was getting on SoundClick.

If you’re really a rapper, you can’t stop rapping.

From the beginning with ‘So Far Gone,’ Drake’s work has been to find a way to deftly balance his singing and his rapping.

People were talking while I was playing, so I got up and left the stage. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not really very patient with patrons rapping during the show. And the people were all nice and quiet when I cam back.

You gotta step up your bars! Look, I run two labels. I sing. I dance. I don’t spend all my time rapping.

You become more tolerant when you become older. You’re not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you’re interested in understanding them.

I first started rapping when I heard the Sugarhill Gang in 1979, when I was 11 years old in seventh grade.

I’m a weird big guy. Doing rapping, doing movies. Do a lot of stuff. But always do things the right way.

It never crossed my mind that I was the white guy rapping. I was best friends with Chamillionaire and whatever he did, I did. If he rapped, I rapped. It was something we did for fun at the track meets or basketball games. Or get in these freestyle cyphers with other schools. Me and Cham rapping together.

If you started listening to me in the same time we started rapping, we’re aging together.

When I got into high school and I was rapping, it was the attention I was loving. It was so hype.

I often find myself writing little ditties I can imagine becoming rap songs. Not the actual rapping part, just the chorus.

Barriers have been broken: rappers are singing, and singers are rapping. You might catch a rapper on a rock song, a pop artist on a hip-hop song – there are so many different things that are going on today. That is the same way in which we live our lives; we’re all over the place. I like to try different things.

When I heard my first rap song and figured out what that was, I kind’ve stuck to it. I always wanted to be a musician in general, an entertainer. I just started rapping. I never decided, ‘Oh, I want to be a rapper.’

I don’t know how I started rapping. The first I did was at school. I tried writing one. I liked it. People started to like it. It was what I wanted to do.

When I say that I’m not dancing, people get it confused, like I’m not going to do anything outside of rap. It’s not that. When I leave this earth, I want to be remembered as an M.C. But I’m definitely going to touch a lot of other genres, not just rapping.

We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, ‘We should do it.’ We weren’t making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.

I started by producing, and the rapping came second to that, because I wanted to fill out the beat.

I was real serious when it came to rapping. I still do, but even more so when I was real young.

I’ve never seen Kendrick Lamar crack a joke, and I’ve met him, but I’m sure he’s hilarious, too, just because he’s so good at rapping. J. Cole is a funny guy as well. Drake is funny. But who’s the funniest guy I’ve met who is a rapper? I would say 50 Cent.

I don’t have to work on it. I’m naturally a writer. The rapping and writing, they can go hand-in-hand – but rapping is an art that you have to practice and master, so I worked at it for a long time.

When I was a kid, I was just rapping about school and stuff like that.

I envy Jonghyun’s technique and energy, Onew’s voice, Key’s rapping skills and Minho’s looks.

I listen to R&B when I ain’t rapping. It’s soothing, it relaxes my mind, it takes me to different places, and it just opens up my brain.

I’m living proof that there’s no age limit to rapping.

I remember going backstage on a random night and Kanye goes, ‘Ayo Premier, I’m about to drop an album called ‘College Dropout’ and I’m rapping on the whole thing. And as I soon it drop it’s gonna go double platinum.’ I looked at him like, ‘That’s a bold statement to make if you never rapped before.’

I was always into the West Coast rap, the production and the flows were always more appealing to me. I think my rapping days are over though.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I read in an interview with Lil Wayne that he recorded a mixtape of something like 50 straight minutes of him rapping all of his material because he felt like he could never move on to the next phase of his musical exploration if he didn’t get it down on tape.

Gibberish rap is – I freestyle all the time, just hangin’ out with friends. And sometimes when I’m freestyling, I’ll lose my flow, you know, but I’ll still wanna – I don’t wanna just stop rapping because I lose my flow. So I’ll just put in nonsense words till I can bring in regular words again.

I always knew that I would be some type of public figure, but I never knew that it would be rapping, ’cause my dad sang: I saw him deal with the ills of the music industry, just on the outside looking in.

Before I was rapping, I was always around the rap game, even though I was in the streets. I would be at all the parties and all the events, and I was pretty hard to miss. I was one of the few Spanish cats sitting there with jewelry on, Dapper Dan suits. It was pretty hard to miss me.

To be rapping in a musical on Broadway is just – that sentence doesn’t make any sense in my brain.

I just don’t want to be rapping forever. I love it, but sometimes you got goals for yourself.

It’s mad to think I was just a kid from south London, rapping in parks with friends.

I’ve been rapping since I was 13.

Before I was rapping, I was an interior designer and decorator.

I’ve been rapping since 1979.

I don’t plan to restrict myself to rapping in the future, and I didn’t want to come off as too aggressive, which is why I thought about changing my name.

I started rapping because I wanted people to hear what I have to say, I want as many people to hear me as possible, and I do everything in my power to make that pop.

I don’t want to just be fully rapping my whole life.

When I first started making music, I was all about wordplay and how fast I could rap, but over the years, I’ve really gained an appreciation for melody. What’s cool is that when you’re singing, you have to be concise, and when you’re rapping, you have the opportunity to be really detailed with your lyrics.

I wanna keep rapping, I intend to. It’s good to mix it up, but I’m still gonna stay true to rapping.