I’m so sick of hearing that U.K. hip hop doesn’t get credit and success when I’m working to get it – for me and for others, too.
Hip Hop is the rebirth of civilization. For people who were disconnected from their continent, from their language, from their culture, and from their ancestry, Hip Hop represented a step toward rediscovering what it means to be a Black American, or to be a Latino American.
I don’t understand why people make me want to make music that’s a join-the-dots thing by numbers. I find it really difficult when people say, ‘Aw, you should have made a really big hip hop record, that would have been really good for you’ or, ‘You should have made a song like Lily Allen, that would have been so great.’
More than half of all the hip hop record sales are white people, and I think that might be a result of my record helping people to accept hip hop.
If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push ’em closer.
One of the problems with hip hop is lack of infrastructure and not being able to control its own course. I don’t like that hip hop is full of infantile 35-year-olds. Hip hop cannot afford to be lazy.
As far as hip hop, I ain’t even gonna front, it was ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ That was the first thing I heard where I was like, ‘Whoa.’ You take that beat and do something over it. I started collecting records after that, old records.
We live in a society of triviality, and my music and what I’m about kind of starts to break that mold and adds more meaning and dialogue to hip hop.
I listen to a lot of hip hop artists, and I think hip hop and poetry go hand in hand. The ‘Def Jam Poetry’ on HBO is just so sick to me.
It’s an honour to have been invited to perform in India for ‘Vh1 Hip Hop Hustle.’ This only reconfirms the impact Hip Hop culture and music has made globally.
One of my favourite things about country music is that, at least until recently, you could always count on a solid story, a punchline and a pun. I think it has that in common with hip hop, where they’re not afraid of wordplay and I really appreciate that.
I do get freaked out sometimes. I have kids hop my fence, get into my back yard, and just start screaming at me.
Whenever I’m in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood – as do other family members.
Love & Hip Hop’ is like the Super Bowl of reality TV.
I think hip hop is dead. It’s all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It’s all commercial now.
I am not a BART regular but have taken it probably five times to and from the city with some of my teammates. Nice to just hop on the train and enjoy some of the views of the Bay Area while I’m out.
I come from hip hop for sure, and there are basic elements of that, but then I’ll take from somewhere else, like samba, and do it with trap drums. I like going places other people haven’t gone before.
Joining another big time rock band was the last thing I was looking for, but as the tour went on, I really dug playing to a lot of people, the band sounded great, and just being out there again, got me over my depression and so I decided to hop on board.
Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
I find it fascinating how hip hop as a culture mirrors every mythology from the beginning of mythology. The concept of the single mother and child – the Madonna concept. Hip-hoppers were raised in that.
I was lucky enough to see the original cast of ‘In the Heights.’ This one blew my mind. The infusion of Latin, hip hop and rap with musical theatre, great storytelling and talent was a powerful combination to me during a time when I’d not been moved by much!
I worked hard all these years with my career to finally be on ‘Love & Hip Hop’ and I never got a chance to show the audience a side of me that isn’t always surrounded with drama.
As a brother and sister, our tastes were pretty different growing up. He liked a lot of early hip hop. My dad didn’t understand it and would try to talk him out of it.
Theatre tends to be more metaphorical and intense, as you’re locked in one room and focused on one thing. Television can hop around, and you need to invest in its naturalistic reality more. But I love writing both, precisely because they’re so different.
You used to defend your musical values to the hilt, but now if something isn’t working, you just hop to another band. My youngest daughter went from Justin Bieber to the Jonas Brothers to Joy Division in the space of a few months!
Hip hop minus plugged sounds can be a very different experience.
Detroit is right now a new Mecca for Hip Hop.
Some people work their entire lives to become a professional fighter and see certain guys with exposure or just a name, hop into the professional ranks. It can rub people the wrong way and have them very doubtful of your skills because they see first-hand the hard work and how many years it takes to master this.
Hip hop is doing the new rock thing; there are no rules. They can do anything, really. And that’s inspiring.
When I learned to play music, I was listening to blues music. And all the blues music I liked was super simple and stripped down. And then all the hip hop I liked was super simple and stripped down and we always heard that connection.
You know, if you think about it, the most powerful people on this earth probably never raise their voices – they just say it and people hop to, because they have that power.
When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
If Kurt Angle’s leg fell off, he’d hop twice as fast to make up for the loss of mobility, man. There’s no quit in him.
I’ve been a hip hop head forever. So when it turned out that we were gonna start getting celebrity guests for every show, I wanted rap guys from the get-go.
I was a fan of heavy music – first metal, then punk, then hip hop.
I love hip hop music, I make hip hop music.
If I could take you back in time to the fifties and walk you around to some of the places where I grew up, you’d be trying to get back in your time machine. It wasn’t all sock hops – matter of fact, I never saw a sock hop.
We’re all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles’ in ‘Henry VI.’ Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ embeds the French national anthem.
To show a different side on ‘Love & Hip Hop’ and bring some validity to it and not just be ratchet, messy or whatever the case may be, it was cool to be that guy, not just from a fan standpoint but an artist standpoint.
I just like to hop up on the dance floor and do my thing.
If you are handed something, it’s a blessing and a curse. Look at hip hop artists, they produced everything themselves. Even people like Robert De Niro are getting into production. Again, it’s art vs. marketing. Not everyone can take the risk. You have to break a few eggs to make a good omelet.
I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at once – I’ve been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.
When I was younger I decided I’d hop on the train to New York.
Original hip hop manipulated technologies of all sorts; it was not manipulated by the technology itself.
I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to hop in my car and drive home after rehearsal.
In high school, I was selected for NASA’s Math & Science program. I’d hop on the yellow school bus and head up to Cape Canaveral.
Here’s Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can’t even deal with him because he’s always saying something that people go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe Kanye said that. I can’t believe he did that.’
November is Hip-Hop History Month, where we give celebration to what hip hop has done to bring together people of the world, people of all nationalities, young people, all the political systems and politicians on the planet.
For years, I’ve felt like the loneliest brother on the planet. I don’t play basketball, I can’t dance, and I’d rather listen to Harry Nilsson than hip hop.
You know, hip hop is a big ferris wheel that goes around and you’ve just gotta be able to maintain yourself while it’s going around.
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.
In hip hop, it’s a lot more about lacing a hot track. I start it, I help mix it, I help write it, I help produce it, I cut the person’s vocals. I’m involved from the beginning to the end of a song. I’m not just giving someone a beat, you know?
I grew up listening to hip hop and embracing black culture, probably because it was ‘outsider art.’
The industry is starting to be more open to what we do. I just don’t want us to be boxed in whatever people assume Christian rap should be. We’re dudes who love hip hop, and we love Jesus, and that’s going to be apparent in our music.
