Rap Music Quotes

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.

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

They had all this talent, and they had no instruments. So they started rap music. They rhymed on their own. They made their own sounds and their own movements.

If we were to see Western landay poems, we'd see them out of disenfranchised populations, maybe out of the legacy of slavery. Spirituals, rap music - that would be the space we'd find American landays in.

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.

So for instance in rap music, you very often hear words that would seem very racist, or very misogynous or very homophobic but in some of those instances, the words are being taken back or redefined so that they lose their injurious quality.

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.

I don't have any sympathy for the subject matter, [but] I have great respect for rap artists. In fact, not for the rap artists, but the people who make the music over which they rap. Rap music - the music itself is incredible - but [the people that make the music] are hardly ever credited.

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.".

The U.S government hates rap music

I think it's a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn't seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that's ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.

I didn't have to sell my soul for money. I didn't have to go through trap music; I could just help Ye write songs and get money from it. So I knew when I put my album out I could just be myself. Not saying I won't do a trap beat or rap over one, but that's just not what makes me. That's not all of CyHi.

I love Lady Gaga and I love Katy Perry and R&B and rap music... I love big, American pop music.

I like to get in my own world. When I'm getting ready for a meet, I always have headphones on, listening to rap music to get myself fired up

One of the great things about rap music... it leaves a lot to be desired, as far as I'm concerned, musically, but I do recognize the very important place that it has in music and in creating role models for younger kids to emulate, giving them the dream that they can make it out of whatever situation they're in.

There has been an effect of business rap on the output of today's rap music. But I don't think that's the modern day rapper's fault.

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.

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.

Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.

A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I'd sort of fell the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It's fun, but - somehow - vaguely pathetic.

I think rap music has made more money on dance music than dance music has made on dance music. Just a thought.

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.

Rap music is just computerised crap. I listen to Top of the Pops and after three songs I feel like killing someone.

There's always tons of crap music people are trying to sell us - [it's] the same way with publishers and galleries.

I'm not going to try to be too young because at the end of the day, I'm not 20 anymore. I don't want to sound corny or look corny doing young things. All the stuff that the kids are doing, that's not my place. I believe that everyone followed me back then, they're still here. That's who I'm trying to talk to and relate to. All the trap music and all of that, it's great but I can't do that. I'm going to stay vintage Ginuwine and stay at the place that got me here. That's what people want.

I originally wanted to embrace the imagery and forthrightness of rap music. There are some interesting, dynamic voices in rap. But I find most of it irresponsible in its overt violence and commercialization of anger. As artists, we believe we can will action through language. If that's the case, we have to take responsibility for what we say.

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.

Either I'm listening to rap music, getting hyped up to go out and do something, or I'm listening to church music.

There are poor white people who hear rap music and feel it is about them, because it is. That's why you have an Eminem and a Bubba Sparxxx and rappers like that.

I just appreciate what Andre 3000 has done musically - just the bravery. I think Andre 3000 may be one of the bravest artists in rap music.

With rap music, there are billions and billions of samples that are uncleared that people have never been bothered about on an underground level.

I have considered rap music stars, and there is one in my new book, Lovers and Players, and there is also a hip-hop music mogul who I think you will like a lot.

I have tried... believe me, I have tried to like rap music. It makes me feel so very, very old. I have tried to get home with the downies.

I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.

I don't like rap music at all. I don't think it's music. It's just a beat and rapping.

There's nothing wrong with a woman being proud of an element of her life that's talked about in rap music all the time!

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.

If it's a band I like, I just hope they will survive it all. And I'll admit that if it's crap music, I hope they won't and it'll go away. Simply because there are too many great bands who should be heard in their place.

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.

My mom, she got taken away from me when I was 14 years old. She is incarcerated. My sister was incarcerated. I was homeless. When my mom went away when I was 14... I was forced to live with my aunt. My aunt, she doesn't like rap music. She thinks rap music is the devil's music. Basically she said, "Yo, if you are going to do music you can't do it in my house."

It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.

Not that I want to put the entire rap music style down - I just don't like it. And I know somewhere there's gotta be another guy like that. There's gotta be a guy just like that - just like me. There's gotta be somebody, somewhere... Maybe, maybe an assassin type.

I love pop music just as much as I like rap music, or ill-ass hip-hop music, or rock music.

Rap music is a combination of many different arts to make something new. There's always been a stigma that its existence would be short and only appeal to a certain group - but it's the biggest music in the world.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.

Driving by my ambitions, desire higher positions, to see eternally and my mission, to be more than just a rap musician.

Rap music and rap records used to always be like this: we get one or two shots to a piece cause it was a singles marketplace and when the major record companies saw that it could also handle the sales of the albums then they started to force everybody to expand their topics from 1 to about 10 and you gotta deliver 12 songs, so a lot of times if you took a person who wasn't really developed, and the diversity of trying say 12 different things, you know the companies were like "Cool! Say the same thing 12 different ways."

As a late teenager, the punk movement pushed me further. In particular, the Clash, which happened to leak through the time of disco, showed me that there was this cross-cultural sound that could cut across genres and audiences. Like punk was to disco, rap music was a rebellion against R&B, which had adopted disco and made it worse.

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.

I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships.