Hannibal Buress Quotes

I started rapping towards the end of middle school. In high school, with a lot of my friends, we would make beats and just start rapping - beating on the wall, beating on the table and freestyling.

I've probably wanted to be a rapper since I was a teenager. I was an actor and comedian and stuff, but I always wanted to rap, it was another outlet.

People can look to me as a teacher, but I consider myself a student of hip-hop.

I've been thinking of trying my hand at rap. I've been recording snippets on my BlackBerry.

I started rapping when I was about 12 or 13, just playing around with it.

Rapping was something I always wanted to do, so after school, my friends and I would catch the bus to my house and just sit there writing songs, every day.

I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.

Most people when they rap usually have their homies in the studio who rap with 'em, but they homies don't usually be producers.

I just sing over hip-hop beats, you know. That's what I've been doing. That's what I started in '09 in my dorm room.

But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.

As long as I'm around the cats in the hip hop scene, they'll throw me a track and I'll write a rap over it.

Hip-hop was my first audience - I would rap in the mirror, walk down the street and listen to my Walkman.

I'm really a singer, so I love songs and I love singing. I like rap music, but I didn't grow up freestyling.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.

I'm a big hip hop fan.

I'm a singer who thinks like a rapper.

I wrote my first song, 'Conversion', to this little hip-hop instrumental. I went to an open-mic, plugged my iPod into the P.A., and sang over the beat.

Common would come to my house and give me a freestyle verse. I'd make a new beat for it and put it with something else. That's how I met Eminem - he came to my house back when he first started. He gave me a bunch of freestyles, and that's how we built a relationship. Everyone came to my house.

I was rapping as a hobby. It was something I did for my friends and just played around on ideas and stuff like that.

I used to do the beat box. A friend of mine, he was the rapper and after, we'd be doing a block party or something or a house party, and he's gettin' all the attention and I'd end up with a handful of spit, you know, from doing the beats.

I remember rap music. We used to party and dance off of it. Today it's all about a whole different angle... Rappers are going against each other, and it's more of a bragging, boasting thing.

I actually grew up break-dancing. When you break-dance you listen to hip-hop and rap, so I've been listening to that music since I was a kid.

I was in a band in high school and college and I always had a love for music, but I didn't go to a conservatory or anything like that. I was fairly self-taught.

First thing you have to understand is that freestyling is much different than making hip-hop music: there's another whole element to being a hip-hop MC.