I grew up with park jams. That’s how I knew about rap… The local MCs would grab the mic and start rapping. I just used to be so in awe and fascinated and like, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ But I would never, ever touch the mic. Heck no.
There’s not too many one-producer rap albums. There are lot of one-producer rock albums… and country albums.
You kind of have to be secretive about what you’re doing post-football because if you’re really outward and everyone knows about it while you’re playing football then the rap on you is, ‘Oh, you don’t care about the game.’
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.
I stand out. I don’t really think I fit in with the ‘what rap is’ today. I feel like I stand out because I’m talking about me and my homies and stories from my life. I ain’t really trying to have you turnt up all day.
Lisa ‘Left-Eye’ Lopes in TLC, she stood out a lot with her rap. It was so different, the way she would flow.
When I was growing up, to be an emcee meant to write the most clever, intellectual, and wittiest rap. And that’s what we did.
Rap is just somebody getting something off his chest. That’s all it is.
Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whole.
I’m huge into ’90s rap. It’s my jam.
I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’
Celebrity is ridiculous and silly and it’s mad that people like me are listened to – you know, rap stars and movie stars.
It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.
When I first came in the game, I had a bunch of homies that rapped that was hanging around me just because I was getting the rap attention, and they felt they could feed off of that.
Of course, if you’re gonna make a rap song, you’re gonna want to sound like Melle Mel.
To me, rap music is bigger than who’s the coolest rapper, the biggest rapper. It’s everything about your personality.
I am an activist and rapper from Afghanistan, and I use rap to speak out and help end child marriage.
I love rap. I love hip-hop. But something is wrong when every song, no matter what, has got a rap.
‘Blueprint 3’ is made up of songs, but it’s also a commentary on the idea that in order for rap to survive, we have to stretch out the drama. We have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.
I love pop music… some hip hop… not super big into rap, but I love Rihanna. I love Alicia Keys. Rihanna was my first concert I went to. I love her.
You might remember me from Eminem’s rap lyrics.
People want to rap about having a good time.
The most popular rap artists aren’t supposed to be rapping about being broke.
As far as anybody in the rap game ever tryin’ to assassinate my character, that’s impossible. You talkin’ about a man who has always walked the walk and talked the talk.
To stand out, I just use my talents. I rap, and I sing as well. With that being said, people kind of know me for bringing that emotion in music.
If you look at my rap sheet, it’s very long.
I loved English and I tell kids that without English I wouldn’t be able to rap.
One of the first albums that I remember, rap albums I remember really listening to, was LL Cool J ‘Mama Said Knock You Out.’
I understand what rappers are talking about. I think rap is less about educating people about the black community and more about making money.
I listen a lot to rap, and I’m inspired to take it, to use it in another way, to get the message across.
After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.
If you’re broke, you don’t want to rap about being broke; you gonna rap about hustling and getting that bread.
The day Obama got into office, rap was less important because Obama gave kids an alternative. But will rap ever go away? No. There will always be a need for poets.
I like rap. I like anything with soul. I like anything you can feel, anything that makes you think that the artist had to make that song, or they were going to go crazy.
Pete Rock, CL Smooth, all this East Coast stuff – that’s kind of, like, the rappers I first admired. I wanna rap just like them because I just thought they were so hard. I thought their delivery was so crazy.
Back in the day, when the D.J. would be playing a record, I’d be on the mic trying to hype up the crowd. So once Public Enemy became a rap group, I decided that that’s the role that I wanted to take on. I wanted to be the one that was hyping, because I’ve always been good at it. I can hype up any crowd.
I was about nine years old when I first heard Wu-Tang’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ Before that, I didn’t know anything about rap or hip-hop. I was just into Korean pop.
I look at Puff Daddy as somebody that gave me a chance to prove the whole world wrong. Cause when I used to think about rap, everybody would say, ‘Well, you talk too slow,’ or, ‘You rap too slow,’ when in reality, that was my uniqueness.
There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.
Everybody knows with rap artists, if you can’t go to the hood, it’s almost like you’re not authentic, even if you’re a dope artist that’s respected.
I think rap music is brought up, gangster rap in particular, as well as video games, every other thing they try to hang the ills of society on as a scapegoat.
Scandinavian rap started in the ’90s, off the back of Run DMC, and it was a bunch of Swedish dudes doing the same thing.
The whole world has changed much since the ’80’s. In the united States, rap music and country music dominate radio and that certainly wasn’t the case in the early ’80’s.
I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.
Not anyone can rap to my beats.
My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.
I care most about what rappers think about me as a rapper, and I’ve gotten a lot of praise. I think rappers understand I’m a really good rapper, and that means more to me than a random person, you know, ’cause they know what goes into making rap music.
I had a lot of respect for Prodigy. He brought the hood to the booth. When we were trying to shape this rap thing into something, he was one of the cats I respected for bringing the hood into the booth.
We grew up listening to alternative music from the ’90s, and there was no shame in being on a major label and still making the music you wanted to make. I feel like rap rock came around and drew a line in the sand, and everybody that was like me ran away from that and started making indie-rock.
I’d dropped out of high school without really doing it on purpose – I’d just go home at lunch ‘cos I didn’t have friends, then stay there all afternoon listening to rap. It got to the point where I wouldn’t have passed even if I’d gone back. I was depressed, basically.
With me and YG, he could rap a hook, and I could make a beat around it. Ten minutes, we done.
There was a point in time, when I put out the Chief Keef diss, where I was so hot that everybody was calling my phone. But I decided to go set up under Wale, but he wasn’t really teaching me how to rap.
The watch everybody rap about, I have in real life.
I’m not ever going to stop rapping. I love rap.
If you have another actor like Ranveer Singh, same energy and same vibe, you probably won’t look at that person. There are a lot of people who can rap, it’s just a different personality or sound that gets noticed.
I collected child support in Dade County, and they wrote a rap song about me, so the kids knew about it, and they started asking me questions about child support. What happens if she wastes the money? What happens if he doesn’t pay? And I answered the questions.
Honestly, when I do a lot of records where it’s super lyrical, all that it is to prove and to show people, like, I can really rap. I can switch flows – I can go with the best of them – so first of all, I want you to respect me as a rapper.
Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.
The bar is so low in rap – mediocrity is king!
When I rap, it’s just an extension of how I speak, and that’s how I talk. If you don’t like it, don’t listen.
I always wanted to do something I knew I could love to wake up and do every day, and rap was just second nature to me, growing up in Harlem. I never really had to try.
I am getting all this fame, but I don’t absolutely know what I should rap about.
What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.
Unless life is one giant rap battle, you don’t need to freestyle your way to success.
I was, like, in a rap gang. I loved rap, and it was all around me.
I always looked up to people who did more than just rap or focus on music. I’m inspired by the people who put their different talents to use and turned it into something bigger.
I think my genre is more ‘reality rap’; I talk about my life and the struggles that I’ve been through.
