When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.
The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.
Resistance here doesn’t mean revolution. It doesn’t mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it’s that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.
Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.
Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.
We have to get back to “we.” It’s important to get back to “we” not just “I.”
Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.
There’s no such thing as success on an isolated level.
How do you plan a rebirth? I’m not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can’t endure it any long, and then you move forward until you’re standing in the light.
Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.
It’s a funny word, persistence. It means not giving up, but it also means just passing on through time.
Switching off perfection switched on the human quality
Part of me would just like to relax and have one job that pays me the amount I need to survive. And another part of me wants the creativity that comes out of struggle and frustration and fear. It’s a never-ending cycle, which must be how I want it, on some level.
I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I’m not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there’s a real answer. Maybe life’s a circle.
Just because the laws were changed doesn’t mean that the attitudes have changed.
I really appreciate when people use their fame and their voice for more than just self-promotion, starting a dialogue about a topic or an issue much bigger than themselves.
Half the time, my job is basically to talk people off the ledge. It’s more psychological than just me picking up some sticks and counting, “1, 2, 3, 4.”
All we sell is the Greatest feeling on Earth
To be hip-hop is much more than just rapping in the production. It is more in the attitude.
My life’s goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that.
Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive.
I hate videos. I’m meticulous on everything from cover art, fonts, productions, mixing. But when it comes to videos, I just feel so defeated.
I don’t bask in the awards I’ve won, read my bank statements, I refuse. To me, that’s how you start losing the hunger.
And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you’re not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you’re not serving their idea of you.
Highlight reels are about that one person. After a barrage of highlight reels, you get the sense that you can do it without a team. But music thrived the most when groups were involved. People lose sight of that – that community makes the world run.
