Rap Quotes

My character is meant to know nothing about rap, and not to like it very much, but I know about it, because my kids make me listen to it. There's some rap I do like very much. I like Eminem, Blackalicious.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

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.

Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

And to turn it into rap wasn't too difficult besides just rhymin' the last words of each line.

I mean I'll be retired from rap, so what I'll be doin' in rap will be for fun.

I'm a singer and a writer first. I started to rap by accident, being playful.

I think stuff on the radio is mostly good, but it's just not what I'm into. I'm not into rap metal.

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 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.

I didn't realize how much harm I was doing back then and I think a lot of rap artists probably don't realize it now. I said a lot of stuff fooling around back then, and I saw it do a lot of harm.

I listen to all the top 20 songs, and top 20 albums, even the rap albums. But I don't like negative messages. If somebody is putting a lot of ego out there, I don't like it. When I make my records I want it to be sincere.

I don't want to rap about my car. How generic is that? Be creative.

Everybody in the '80s, well, we hate rap. Now, the biggest rapper in the world... Eminem. Rap's a black thing.

Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you're always going to find a hip-hop tape; that's all I buy, that's all I live, that's all I listen to, that's all I love.

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.

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?

I don't even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.

If I have a rap album I'm dropping, then I want it to be the best rap album.

I was a metalhead and then I was into the rap and then I was a metalhead again.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

I would say that I'm more moved by melody, even though I love to rap.

I think that rap is narrative, when it's done right.

We have groups that do that, but I can't rap with the mentality of an 18 year old when I'm in my 30's.

I have periods where I listen to regular rap, Jay-Z, Eminem and Lil Wayne. The next day I might have some Christian alternative music. The next day I have on some dance music. It all varies what I listen to.

I don't like the fact that there are so few women in rap.

The biggest rap on me is that I don't find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It's not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused.

When I first got into the rap game, I had an early dream of unifying rappers.

When you've been raised in care, rap music isn't just about guns and sexism. They're talking about real things you can hang on to, problems of identity that you have sympathy with. It's not just about the music, with rap: when I was in care, it meant a whole lot more than that.

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.