Hops Quotes

Every time you ask yourself where hip-hop's going, ask yourself where you're going; how are you doing?

Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and decontextualizing it.

Man, I would demand that artist come to the table with better variety. I would demand that musicians know music history, not just Hip-Hop, so that we could understand. The better your 'listening ear' is, the better your music will be.

We can teach about hip-hop history, we can teach about legends, hip-hop theory. It's been around so long that text books can be written about it. This is a perfect time to capitalize on and get kids excited about music education.

A certain administration which I won't call by name took the arts out of the schools, and that left the brothers out on the street with nothing, so they went to the turntables and started rhyming. Then they had a way to express themselves, and that's the birth of hip-hop.

At the end of the day, you want to be always the one that's one step ahead of everybody, and when it comes to hip-hop, culture and art, you want to be that signature guy.

I may be Jewish, but my religion is hip-hop.

I want kids of this generation to see that everything is cool, that there's some kind of unity in hip-hop. We all found something that's really important to us, and music is all we've really got.

I'm 60, and I did 60-year-old women songs. I'm not trying to be the Hip-Hop Queen, although I am the original Hip Hop Queen.

I think hip-hop is really fun right now... and that's why people are using dance beats and singing more.

Wherever I go, I bring the culture with me, so that they can understand that it's attainable. I didn't do it any other way than through hip-hop.

My son is a hip-hop producer.

Hip-hop can be limiting and I refuse to accept limits.

I'm a big hip hop fan.

I make soul music for hip-hop heads. It's music I'd want to sample if I were a rapper.

I can't control what people think. I'm not trying to manipulate people's thoughts or sentiments. I write all the time. You have to experience life, make observations, and ask questions. It's machine-like how things are run now in hip-hop, and my ambitions are different.

I know nothing about hip-hop... There's only so many times you can grab your crotch and prance around stage. I'm gonna get slammed now for this.

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

I was into hip-hop when I was a teenager. Then I started to look for samples, and I started a long Hendrix period - I liked the drums and the beats.

When the band begins to get a name for themselves, and the writers get assigned to bands, they'll hit somebody who just doesn't like that kind of music, or they love hip hop but hate guitar rock.

I got introduced to the rave scene in 1992. At the time I was into skateboarding; I listened to a little hip-hop but was mainly into heavy metal and grunge.

When I was a kid, you listened to a certain genre. Now it's like, "I love indie rock, I love hip-hop, jazz, funk." Also, we knew it couldn't be the same thing each year.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest.

We've always talked about doing something else and Campbell Scott is always busy and I'm always busy. But when we came up with the idea of doing the potato famine as a hip hop musical, I wanted somebody who was going to bring gravity.

I don't think hip-hop is a dying art form. I think it's impossible for hip-hop to be a dying art form.

[Moses] is obsessed with hip-hop and wanted a gold chain like his uncle Jay-Z.

Hip-hop was started as a very egocentric, testosterone, machismo-driven art form. The way that people are trying to take away that masculinity that is a such an intrinsical part of hip-hop music.

If you take a guy like a Barack Obama, who's raised millions of dollars from the most donors in the history of this nation, it suggests that there's a deep and profound hunger for a new politics to come forth. And a guy like him has been able to mobilize that and to reach certain parts of the hip-hop generation.

Throughout hip-hop people have been putting different elements with different types of music.

I realize I look very hip hop but I'm really more emo with a definite Brazilian flavor.

Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

Well hip hop is basically the whole culture of the movement. There's the rap which is a form of hip hop culture. It could be breakdancing, freestyle dancing or whatever type of dancing that's happening now in the Black, Hispanic and White community.

We wound up taking my enterprise inside marketing, branding, management, finances. We went in there [Sisterhood of Hip Hop show] and taught them a little bit about everything in hopes of them being able to have some takeaways that they'd be able to use in the future for their own careers. And I think we were pretty successful.

It was actually the production group that ended up producing the show for us...Every musician, especially in the hip-hop community, you always make these show recaps or vlogs, and essentially what "Touring's Boring" was is, we tried to make our vlogs interesting and almost more like a TV show. That's how we got discovered by TV.

The borders and boundaries of hip-hop have been broken all over the world. There's a great scene everywhere you go.

Hip-hop is the streets. Hip-hop is a couple of elements that it comes from back in the days... that feel of music with urgency that speaks to you. It speaks to your livelihood and it's not compromised. It's blunt. It's raw, straight off the street - from the beat to the voice to the words.

I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of our black people culture, and it's the name of our identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls. To me, that's the biggest problem.

You have to look at the fact that Hip Hop is under attack. It's not just Hip Hop but Black people, Latino people and all people are under attack for different things.

Why isn't it hip-hop when I do it? Everybody else can have beef within the music, talk about differences and it's ok. It's music, it's hip-hop, it's ground breaking. When I do it, it's war.

When I fell in love with hip-hop, there was a terminology at the time called "battling." All that was just battling with other artists, but after Tupac and those incidents when it spilled into the street and turned into a negative situation, battling turned into a beef. A whole new dynamic.

From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

I have done so much for hip-hop and 'til this day, I haven't received any awards or any recognition for it.

The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.

If you want to speak about different ethnicities and diversity, rap and hip-hop are all over the planet. Every country, from Turkey to Australia, now has tons of hip-hop artists. The music and artistry have moved way faster than the corporatization of the music. You do need organization and opportunity for these artists to express themselves, and I don't think it has to come from a corporate co-signing.

I would just like to see hip-hop journalism in general take a step up and match the artistry. There have been great writers in music who are the caliber of artist as a writer as the people that they're covering.

If you really look at hip-hop dance, it's really a rites-of-passage thing. You never see the arms release down. They're always up in fighting position. It's going to war. What do we say? We say your're going to battle. You go out there and fight.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

I start thinking: How many souls hip-hop has affected? How many dead folks this art resurrected? How many nations this culture connected? Who am I to judge one's perspective?