Sir Mix-a-Lot Quotes

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.

Music is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the culture.

All films speak to their times. It becomes obvious only after.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

We may not like our times or many aspects of the time we live in but that is not the fault of art as such.

In the '80s and '90s, I was really interested in, moved by, exhilarated by, and troubled by rap in all the ways a white person from Brookline, Massachusetts should be. That was music that was making trouble, and it was interesting and provocative trouble.

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.

If the KKK was smart enough, they would've created gangsta rap because it's such a caricature of black culture and black masculinity.

I look at WorldstarHipHop in the morning, Bossip, Global Grind, and everything in between, but it's all so quick, I don't even think about it. And I've never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music.

I understand what rappers are talking about. I think rap is less about educating people about the black community and more about making money.

Whether it's a popcorn movie or some really intellectual sociopolitical movie, I think to some degree they're all influenced by the social climate that we're living in.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.

Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.

A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.

In every interview I've got to explain something about being white but still being into hip hop. It's gone way beyond the musical aspect of the business. And I'm as critical about music as everybody else is.

I personally don't feel any pressure to make jokes about multiple baby-fathers and stereotypical black jokes, because one, that's just not my life, and two, I wouldn't even sound right talking about those things.

Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question.

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

I do know in the 1960s comics, Martian Manhunter took on the form of a black man - that could have been influenced by the political climate back then.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

Part of being an artist is being able to write about the world you live in and the times that you've been a part of.

A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.

'Rapper's Delight' came from the TV entertainment show 'Good Times,' but when the times called for a shift in the narrative, artists answered, covering brutal truths in their rhymes that were uncomfortable for society to confront.