I don’t think rap really fits in to ‘American Idol’ in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.
Yeah, Travis Scott’s dad taught me how to ride minibikes and how to repair the engines. His name’s Jack Webster. Jack had a drum set and his brother had a bass. So I used to play with them, and that’s what started me wanting to get into music and take it serious. And this is before rap.
I stick to Hindi rap. That is my USP. It gives an Indian essence to my music despite the foreign influence of the genre.
What is feminism? We are just asking for equal opportunities, nothing beyond that. It doesn’t mean that you cannot be pretty or you cannot cook or you can’t do a whole lot of things. Feminism’s got a bad rap; that’s it.
And to turn it into rap wasn’t too difficult besides just rhymin’ the last words of each line.
By now, you should know what you’re getting with Pusha T. I’ve been in this game since 2002, and my name says it all. You know I’m only moved by a certain style of rap. Not that many other styles move me. You have to really be a rapper’s rapper for me to like it.
I started singing to this one John Legend record; it was called ‘Each Day Gets Better,’ or something like that. I started to realize, ‘Wow, I really sound like this dude. If I keep doing this, maybe I can sound dope like John Legend and still rap.’
‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A. is very catchy. I like that, but I listen to everything from rap to Lenny Kravitz to Coldplay, depending on my mood. And my favorite song of all time is ‘Always and Forever’ by Heatwave.
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.
Hackney gets a bit of a bad rap, but it’s the only place I’ve ever lived that felt like a community. I know my neighbours.
I rap and I sing, so then you’ve got a bit of hip-hop in there. I’m Jamaican, so you got a bit of dancehall. And I’m from London, so there’s a bit of London things in there… And at sometimes, it’s a little bit Afrobeat.
One day I’ll make a rap song, the next day I’ll make a pop song, the next day I’ll make a rock song, the next day I’ll make R&B. I don’t have a pattern.
When I did rap and rhyme, it wasn’t just a word that rhymed with another one.
The pleasure of hanging with Drake is that there isn’t a question he won’t try to answer openly and honestly, shifting easily and unselfconsciously between talk of the rap game, money, family, and love.
I feel like the rap metal at the end of the 1990s destroyed rock music for everybody and suddenly everybody felt like they had to apologise for being in rock bands. People suddenly felt bad about wanting to reach massive audiences and the sense of theatre, that we have in our live show, became something to avoid.
I don’t even really like rap music.
David Bowie’s my favorite musician. I love him above all, but I’m really into rap a lot right now.
Maybe in Latvian one day I’ll rap a little bit, but definitely not in English.
All the other rappers around me aren’t saying anything worthwhile. They’re lost in rap: all they do is tell you they’re a sick MC and they’re better than you. I don’t want to look like all these other little punk, dress-up, fake, manufactured artists. I’m not a rapper. I’m an activist.
It is a coincidence that Mathangi is the Goddess of Music and the spoken word, which can be rap.
I used to be the class clown. I was the funny kid. That’s why it was so hard for people to understand that I rap, because for a long time, they didn’t take me seriously for who I was. By, like, eighth grade, I was really rapping.
I’ve been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I’ve always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
I don’t like the fact that there are so few women in rap.
I like Batman, I like basketball, and I like to rap.
I always felt that rap didn’t cause crime; it just reflected it.
I want to relate. I don’t want to just rap and go to the next album.
I do rap and speak in Malayalam but only to save my life as my vocabulary in the language is not as good as it is in Hindi.
Skateboarding was my introduction to rap and the first rap song that I really liked was KRS-One ‘Step Into A World.’
Rap ain’t out there for everybody; everybody can’t be a rapper. Everybody can’t be a singer; anybody can’t just be a songwriter, but it may – there’s some profession out there you can be in.
You gotta do a lot more than rap. Rap is not just rap. If you don’t have an image, you’re not capturing nobody’s attention.
Once upon a time Americans didn’t want to listen to Canadian rap and now Drake’s the biggest rapper in the world.
I feel like I’m doing something in Atlanta that nobody ever did as far as rap. If it happens to end up on the top 40 or the pop charts, it doesn’t mean I meant to go pop. It’s just where the music took me. It started at the bottom, and it rises.
When people ask me what I call myself, I am not going to say ‘Christian rapper,’ because what they think of when they hear Christian rap is something very different from what I do.
I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important.
When I first knew that I wanted to rap I was seven years old and I lost the talent show. It was like spoken word or something. My mom made me do it. It was a Langston Hughes poem. The girl that came on after me, she wound up winning. She was a singer.
The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
Everyone just has different things in their life they want to do. I wanted to clean up my bucket list, explore the world. Rap was our gateway into anything we wanted to do.
I’m a rapper and, obviously, hip hop rap is my main thing. But I also like to dive into different genres and kind of be a bit more experimental and open myself up a bit, whether that’s taking influence from jazz or soul or electronic.
One thing rap and rock have in common, a lot of it is focused on negativity. I like dark stuff.
While I am not a musician, I love music. I have over 15,000 songs on my iPod. Everything from hard core rap to the soundtrack from the original ‘Cinderella.’
People generally thought that sharks are dumb eating machines. After some study, I began to realize that these ‘gangsters’ of the deep had gotten a bad rap.
I’ve been dancing since I was two, learning so many different styles. I like dancing to rap and hip-hop, but also the Strokes, the Hives, and the Vines with carefree randomness. There’s always a way to move to something.
I feel like I’ve started to create my own culture of being a voice for something, and that’s what people want to know about. I love that because I am a woman and because I a rap, and I look the way I look, I can connect with the demographic of people who feel like they have a voice in me.
I really like R&B more than rap.
We are a metal band, period. To me, the ‘nu’ part infers some sort of a rap influence.
I’m just basically spillin’ out my emotions to the world. ‘Cause rap is about emotion. And I want you to feel what I’m feelin’, ’cause that’s what it’s all about.
I think everybody has their own inner rap spirit animal.
I can’t do too much musical movement with a lot of MC’s, because they don’t know how to follow me. But with Souls of Mischief, I could go anywhere because they are musicians – they rap as musicians, and they play instruments and produce, so they get that.
The only time I ever really got into rap was back in the early ’90s, and bands like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Gang Starr. Musically, they were really interesting. But when hip-hop acts start sampling Sting or Phil Collins, then I just don’t get it at all.
I’m also not going to explain something just because I said it in a rap. Take what you want from it.
After the first three or four years of me taking rap seriously, it started to look more promising. I started booking shows and more people were playing my music, so I starting believing this could actually work for me.
An MC is somebody who can control the crowd. An MC is a master of ceremonies so not only can you say your rap, you can rock the party.
I don’t like rap that you can’t understand. The youth is so quick and alert.
I think, British food, it’s had a bad rap.
I want to be able to say that a rap career could be ten albums.
When I first heard rap, I wasn’t quick to be critical. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I had a feeling it was a reflection of what’s been happening in the ghetto.
Nuts have gotten a bad rap because of their high fat content. But their protein, heart-healthy fats, high fibre, and antioxidant content earn them a place in your daily diet. I often say ‘less is more,’ and portion control is key to healthfully enjoying nuts.
I probably have the most versatile playlist in the world, from country to rap to classic rock to classical.
