Who else is putting seven figures down for unreleased rap tracks?
To me, it isn’t tight sweaters. That’s not what rap is. That’s not hip-hop at all. Every phase went through changing up their dress styles and all that, but since Run DMC came out, it’s been baggy jeans.
I think rap definitely has its place in the art world. I think it is an art form. But, just like any art form, you can misuse it.
The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‘Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do’.
I come from a very specific love of hip-hop. I’m saying hip-hop, not rap. That’s what saved my life. I carry that badge with a lot of pride and honor, and I really enjoy trying to raise the perception and the bar of what we do.
I never really liked the idea of rap being a competitive thing. It’s not.
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 don’t wanna be like everybody else, I don’t wanna rap like everybody else.
A lot of rap songs don’t usually have a lot of melody per se.
If there’s something you want to say or talk about, then that’s what rap is all about – talking about your own experience.
Rap culture is interesting and different and has purpose but it has a non-romantic view of life and of social feelings. There may be a void in that.
KRS One and LL Cool J are the biggest influences in my rap career, along with Heavy D.
I didn’t think rap was me. But I was shy to sing in front of people. It’d be so off because I was shy.
My formative years were in Houston. I was in middle school, and everyone was dropping the last half of their names and adding an ‘o’ to the end. My little crew that I had, we were an all-female rap group, and everyone had an ‘o’ at the end of their name. I was Lisso. Then this dude started getting lazy with it, saying Lizzo.
In the ’80s and ’90s, I was really interested in, moved by, exhilarated by, and troubled by rap in all the ways a white person from Brookline, Massachusetts should be. That was music that was making trouble, and it was interesting and provocative trouble.
You know, there are artists who are 35 and up that still make rap and that still works for them. I don’t know if I want to be that guy.
For all my proclivities for thuggery, I am a typical middle-class dad. I’m a gangsta rap suburban father!
In the 80s, I remember the radio stations would play everything from rock to rap.
I got tired of the Ramones around the time I quit and I really got into rap. I thought it was the new punk rock. LL Cool J was my biggest idol.
I think Bhutanese food – long dissed by every food writer out there – has gotten a bum rap.
I feel like everybody that saw my videos was like, ‘Oh this dude’s about to rap.’ They just played my videos, and I feel like I shocked a lot of people.
I don’t sit down to write a country song. I don’t sit down to write a rap song. I just sit down to write a song, you know what I mean? And I try to make that song the best it can be.
I’m trying to bring gangster rap back to the forefront, like in the early ’90s.
Back in the day, if someone said that hip hop and rap was a fad, that was a joke to me because they just didn’t know what they were talking about. In reality, there were so many people who didn’t know what they were talking about it.
Lots of people are saying that I shut down mumble rap in one 10-minute setting. But that wasn’t my intention, because mumble rap – if we go back – that’s something I invented.
I want to keep making records as long as I can, but I don’t know how long you can be taken seriously in rap.
Rick Ross is bigger to me than Dizzee Rascal. My music is more gangsta rap than anything English.
Technology gets a bad rap for keeping us glued to our screens instead of being present with whomever is around us, and while this can be true, it also allows us to connect with billions of people all over the world. For free.
The hit rap duo Kris Kross wore their trousers backwards, in the Nineties, and I wore my trousers backwards to a school disco. It led to some bullying.
I like everything that people say. No matter what they say. You gay, you a punk. You got a nice girlfriend, you’re ugly, you can’t rap, you’re the hardest.
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.
Rap is from the streets and I’m from the streets. That’s why a lot of people accept me.
I think people are slowly realizing that don’t have to be looking in a mirror to enjoy something. And they’re realizing that watching a show with drag queens in it doesn’t make you gay any more then listening to rap makes you black.
I have this thing. I can rap really fast. I can rap really, really fast. It’s a thing I’m good at and I’ve trained myself to do; it’s a thing I do in the Bay Area.
Anyone can rap if you’ve got brains. So I just went with it.
The rap community know that I’m doing very well. They’re embracing me… They like the flavour.
I went to college at NYU for acting, since acting was my dream from very young. I did a lot of hip-hop courses while I was there. I helped co-write a hip-hop production for the main stage of NYU, but I never touched rap.
Out of every other rap guy, Wiz is the most humble, down-to-earth guy, like me.
I wish I could rap! I wish I could rap like Azealia Banks or Lil Wayne or someone like that… Twista. He’s super fast.
Rap – it’s a childhood passion. Writing rhymes, it’s something that I was doing before rap records even existed. And I will continue to write until I can’t write anymore.
Single guys get a bad rap.
I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.
I’ve been known to drop a spoken-word bit into a song from time to time. But not straight-up rap. I don’t know that I have that gift.
I originally got my name after a gun because the way I rap; a gangster gave me the name in 1988.
When I was 16, I was rapping just to rap.
Well unfortunately I didn’t work with Andre much. But rap is a strong presence in the culture and anyone is going to grateful for its appearance, grateful for any kind of music that has the kind of effect that rap has had on us all.
A lot of singers find a musical genre people like and stick with it. That’s being a conformist. I sing ballads, rock, salsa, rap.
I really didn’t want to rap; I was just a regular kid.
There is rap music in all my films. In ‘La Vie des Morts,’ there is rap music too. It’s because I’m French, and when it appeared in 1978, it was so new, it set off my musical imagination.
What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.
I go to a lot of stand-up comedy. I find more inspiration from observational stuff than from rap.
I’m a fan of hip-hop. I’m a fan of rap, so anything new that’s happening, I’m hip to it.
When Ke$ha tries to rap like L’Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she’s the star. Ke$ha’s greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
Anything that’s of any use, famous people get hold of it and take it for themselves and it gets a bad rap.
But, Eminem… No, I’ve loved rap for a long time, especially when it got out of its first period and became this gangsta rap, ya know this heavy rap thing? That’s when I started to fall in love with it. I loved the lyrics. I loved the beat.
I feel like rap fit me better. I could hoop. I could have went and did that, but this is my lifestyle, my temperament, my mentality.
When I was signed to Quincy Jones before I went independent, he told me to rap what you know, and people will forever feel you. And I stuck to that, no matter how many people called me a devil worshiper, no matter how many people call me a cult leader. I stuck with rapping about what I know.
As long as I’m around the cats in the hip hop scene, they’ll throw me a track and I’ll write a rap over it.
When you talk about rap you have to understand that rap is part of the Hip-Hop culture.
Look at Pusha-T. He makes a certain type of rap music. ‘Daytona’ is that on the highest level.
Growing up listening to rap music, you almost feel like you should have haters. That’s an important part of being a successful musician. It’s a good thing, I guess.
‘The Rap Year Book’ is really great. Shea Serrano wrote it, and it became this huge phenomenon where he sold out everywhere and made the bestseller list just on the strength of his fans on Twitter wanting him to succeed.
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.
You don’t want me to sing. I could do a really bad karaoke scene, if I had to, but I’d probably choose to rap.
Rap isn’t that time-consuming for me, compared to an ordinary artist. I do not stay in the studio all day.
I looked at the rap community like street kids wanting their own brand. But now I look at that period with the rappers in the 90s as a trend of the moment. What it taught me was never to follow a trend, because trends move on.
