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.’
