Quotes about hip hop

Heroes? Nah. Just common contributors hopin' that what we created inspires you to selflessly challenge and contribute.

I make you famous, turn around, then make you nameless

Don't be flirtin' with your gift, you better marry it—you nervous?

The way that was mixed, the fucking hiss—that song feels like when depression hugs you.

The grace as I ease across the stage

Bars around the audience, sort of like a cage

They laugh, 'cause they assume I'm in prison

But in reality, they're locked in

You could put a lot of Auto-Tune on it and it’ll still be a sucky song.

Apart from jazz, hip-hop is the last true American art form.

What's a stage with no mic and no voice of a poet?

What's more important, the flower or the soil that grow it?

Music never felt like a job. Now it’s just like people waiting to see if I fail.

My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism

In conversation with a marginal system in love with Jesus

And y'all still thought a bitch couldn't rap huh?

You be into rap beef 'cause you ain't never had beef

I don't make music to make people feel comfortable or reaffirm all the things that they already thought

If you listen to a whole album and never had to question one of your beliefs or your opinions about the world, or yourself, then you weren't really listening

They don’t make statues of the critics. Judgment and critique are not more important than art.

Music is a mirror of what we’re going through, not the cause of what we’re going through.

Don’t underthink me, and don’t overthink me. Don’t underestimate me, and don’t overestimate me. Just do you.

I did without until I did within

I said on beat what I wrote in pen

I gave my all without givin' in

But it's a thin line between heavenly divine and a livin' a life of sin

I sold quarters, just so happens I'm the author of your favorite songs

You're just a butter knife, I'm a machete

I take what I do very seriously, but it’s a lighthearted seriousness.

Yo, I speak at schools a lot cause they say I'm intelligent

No, it's cause I'm dope, if I was whack I'd be irrelevant

I didn’t feel connected to hip-hop growing up. I never wanted a chain or a mansion. I just wanted niggas to stop dying.

Music was my side chick, but now we’re moving in together

I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses

And goddamn, if everybody was lyrical, everybody would sound the same.

Dangerous rhymes performed like surgery

Cuts so deep, you'll be bleedin' burgundy

My poems crush bones into powder

You mumble like a coward

I'm Mos Def, you need to speak louder

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

Music is supposed to inspire (Oh yeah)

How come we ain't gettin no higher? (We ain't getting no higher, getting no higher)

I got love for the game but ay I'm not in love with all of it

We saw something that works and everybody jumps on that bandwagon. We stopped being creative and started being manufacturers.

I wanted to be technical. I wanted to be complex. I wanted to make my act a hard act to follow. Bottom line.

I couldn't find anybody that would give me what I needed, so I had to make it myself.

Dark Fantasy was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology.

First nigga with a Benz and a backpack

Marlon Brando is not a gangster-actor, he's an actor.

I take seven emcees put 'em in a line

And add seven more brothers who think they can rhyme

Well, it'll take seven more before I go for mine

Now that's twenty-one emcees ate up at the same time

My ink so hot, it burn through the journal

I'm blacker than midnight on Broadway & Myrtle

Half short, twice strong. It means less is more.

I wanted to be as sinister as possible, so I bought a witchcraft book and my momma kicked me out the house when she found it.

But these scriptures are sculptures for crews of dead rappers, the words hover above like vultures

One of the ways artists can put themselves ‘on the map’ is to stop thinking about the lines on the map.

Lock yourself in a room

Doing five beats a day for three summers

It's funny how everyone is saying how hip-hop has become too materialistic and violent now. But we were saying it back then.

I wanna relax with them and spend time to the maximum

But if silence is golden, then me making noise is platinum

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss.

People get so mad with what the kids is doing, the new hip-hop. It’s not for you — mind your business.

All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day

Put the pieces back together my way

Stop creating from the perspective of what other people want you to make.

my DNA is hip-hop. So if you check my DNA, it got Slick Rick, it got Ice Cube, and it got Rakim.

In this moment, as a creative, my process is to leave it all on the page, on the stage, and on the table, because none of this shit is promised, man.

And even after all my logic and my theory

I add a "motherfucker" so you ignant niggas hear me

The industry is force-feeding us this music and I'm like, "Nah, I'll go listen to this Outkast or something else." I am on a global mission to make good music and bring that feel back.

18, makin' raps 'til I'm 80 though

And too hard for the fuckin' radio

Like, I tried to rhyme so you couldn’t hear me take a breath.

I'm sick of bitches shakin' asses

I'm sick of talkin' 'bout blunts, sick of Versace glasses

Sick of slang, sick of half-ass awards shows

It's like a battle, trying to find the right words to say at the right time.

This New Math is whippin' motherfuckers' ass

You wanna know how to rhyme? You better learn how to add

If rap was a game, I'll be MVP

The most valuable poet on the M-I-C

There's the gift, there's the spirit, and there's the work—all three have to come together.

Average emcees is like a TV blooper

MF DOOM, he's like D.B. Cooper