Rap quotes
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"One thing that I like to do is use words that have never actually been used in a rap song before. I also like to take words that have negative connotations and show their real meaning."
"I think America just needs to get real when it comes to the way our kids speak and communicate. They need to understand what happens in rap."
"I don't want to do rap that makes people feel bad."
"I'm the rap version of Dave Chappelle. I'm not sayin' I'm nearly as talented as Chappelle when it comes to political and social commentary, but like him, I'm laughing to keep from crying."
"Either I'm listening to rap music, getting hyped up to go out and do something, or I'm listening to church music."
"It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange."
"The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper."
"I hate to get on the racial thing because that's something I've always been totally against. But the problem with the media is that they think that the word rock means white and the word rap means black."
"It really really sunk into me when I went to Europe and they take rap so much more serious than we do here. That was the first time I ever heard rap considered folk music. And sometimes somebody will make you understand like, "Hey, what you doin' is serious, don't play it lightly 'cause it's changin' my life.""
"Rapping is a vocal delivery, so you can do it without being part of hip-hop and not knowing what hip-hop is about."
"I wouldn't write about sh*t I don't know. You won't hear me write about politics in Africa and stuff, because I don't know enough about it. And I would never rap about something I can't back up."
"I look at my career and I feel I have the potential to maybe mature into a Samuel Jackson-type older cat, and people will still respect me and say 'Yo, Ice-T was wild', into my old age. And why not? I don't necessarily think I'll be rapping in 10 years."
"It's like a paradox. For one side, being popularized rap got better and the other side of it got worse. It's very pop and it's very different now. When you make it as pop and as soft as it is, it lacks its integrity. It lacks its accountability. It lacks a lot of other things that came from that dangerous time in hip hop."
"What's bad for the culture is wack rappers that get held in high regard like they're some great thing because it's the flavor of the month, but everybody knows they can't rap. I don't think it's hard, even for somebody who's not hip-hop, to know that that's not good. When you put them up against somebody that can really rhyme, you go, "Okay, I get it. This is what it should sound like.""
"I don't feel that rap has been respected as an art form. Because people have seen rappers rap off the top of their heads, they don't think it is difficult."
"A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes."
"I think all music - not just rap - has fallen into this very diluted, delusional state, where everyone's singing about money and having cars, and having all this fun; when really, people are losing their homes."
"If you really think back to the culture or just black America before rap music took off, New York could have been Paris."
"I think rap music is the sole reason for a lot of black acceptance in pop culture; because the music is very popular, it gets our image out in other ways than in movies."
"You the devil in drag. You can burn your cross, Well, I'll burn your flag."
