I fell in love with music at 13-years-old. I wanted to be a singer at first and a drummer. Then I fell in love with rap music.
My earliest memories of rap music was mixed with my earliest memories of reggae music. They were big sounds around the way, heavy bass lines, strong messages, definitely.
They sought out rap music to attack, but you don't hear that anymore because it made too much money. They use Che Guevara to sell soft drinks. If something comes out that is radical and it's successful, then it's no longer radical. It's co-opted.
I never really thought I was going to be a singer, honestly. I never listened to singers; I always listened to rap music.
If I were to critique myself - step out of KRS objectively and look at him - I would say that KRS has introduced the concept of being hip-hop, not just doing it. The concept of rap as something we do, while hip-hop is something we live. The concept of living a culture. Don't just look at hip-hop as rap music, see it as a culture.
It's not that you don't make any money doing conscious rap music. You make a lot of money doing this, but if you're greedy and you're not satisfied with $500,000 a year, and you want $2 million a year, then you will suffer as a conscious rap artist.
One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.
Ego is my career. Rap music is all ego.
We were coming out of the black community with this thing called rap music, which was basically black men yelling at the top of their lungs about what we liked and what we didn't like. It was disturbing to the status quo. It really shook things up. And those in power didn't know what to make of us, but they knew that we had to be silenced, stopped in any way from expressing our outrage.
Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time. It was a time of heightened rightwing politics, so the climate dictated the direction of the group.
The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice. Landays, they're about love and pleasure and oppression and levels of oppression within a family. And because of that, I think rap music is probably closely related.
I think that all journalists, specifically print journalists, have a responsibility to educate the public. When you handle a culture's intellectual property, like journalists do, you have a responsibility not to tear it down, but to raise it up. The depiction of rap and of hip-hop culture in the media is one that needs more of a responsible approach from journalists. We need more 30-year-old journalists. We need more journalists who have children, who have families and wives or husbands, those kinds of journalists. And then you'll get a different depiction of hip-hop and rap music.
To me, that's the biggest problem with hip-hop today is the fact that everyone believes that all of hip-hop is rap music, and that, when you say "hip-hop," it's synonymous with rap. That when you say "hip-hop," you should be thinking about breakdancing, graffiti art, or MCing - which is the proper name for rap - DJing, beat-boxing, language, fashion, knowledge, trade. You should be thinking about a culture when you say, "hip-hop.".
What we're doing now, is to try to eradicate the limited notion of how people are interacting with each other through hyper-racialized ideas. A lot of it deal with, as an example, genre. If I ask you to visualize a trap musician or a hip-hop musician, you'll see one thing. If I say visualize a western classical musician, you'll see a very different thing. A lot of how music is disseminated to us is hyper-racialized. It's not something that we think about all the time, but if you take a minute to look back, it's why you get this argument when there's a white rapper.
In high school I had a boyfriend who was super into rap, so I was into Too $hort and Wu-Tang for a little while. And my best friend's older brother would sometimes drive us home in this pimped-out truck, and he'd play all his dirty rap music. We thought we were really cool.
I remember rap music. We used to party and dance off of it. Today it's all about a whole different angle... Rappers are going against each other, and it's more of a bragging, boasting thing.
I've never been into alternative, hipster rap music.
Do you see how Jerry Heller made it work? That is how he combined what we did to make the rap music into mass music. That's exactly how it happened.
I love pop music just as much as I like rap music, or ill-ass hip-hop music, or rock music.
I just make [music] for the people that always enjoyed hearing from me. I make it for people that enjoy the energy of rap music or a good rhyme. I do it for the people I see everyday, not the Hollywood ass people, the normal people.
There's always tons of crap music people are trying to sell us - [it's] the same way with publishers and galleries.
Let the voice be the voice of the voiceless and let it come from the world of rap music to keep the stereotype and the peace at the same time.
For a long period of time, the media covered rap music and hip hop the same way they cover a lot of black people, people of color, you know, the bad news happens to be news. They used to have these little stupid colloquialisms that pop up like, "You know what? No news is bad news!" They trick the masses into thinking that any news is great for you. And I just think that's a piece of crap.
Rap music's been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn't.
I didn't get into music until the early 90s when I heard rap music for the first time.
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