John Legend Quotes

N.W.A. were the first great rap audio documentarians of the problems in our inner cities.

I love rap because it talks about pain that comes authentically from the ghetto. It moves me.

Who gave it that title, gangsta rap? It's reality rap. It's about what's really going on.

I've always written about social concerns. My first book was about Spanish Harlem.

We do have a problem in this country. You can either make a movie and ignore that, or you can acknowledge it and say, this is the water that we're living in. You know this - the movie lives in this - it's centered around this particular problem, and I chose to acknowledge it.

Pop culture mirrors culture, and, I think, as a rapper, hip-hop in a lot of ways mirrors the things that are happening in urban neighborhoods.

I don't know that there is a, quote, 'hip-hop lifestyle.' I think the music responds to complex social issues and injustices; I think it also raises complex social questions.

I grew up around hip-hop so I didn't think it was about being cool or being black or being white or whatever.

I grew up in Brownsville; most of the kids I grew up with went to jail, not Yale. If they had heard of Yale, they thought it was a lock to pick.

Public Enemy is the security of the hip-hop party.

By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.

I do Skid Row every night.

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

When you're trying to bring the streets into rap to prove a point, then you already lost. You separate the two, and that ain't to be played with. You've got people that lost their lives and people that are doing real time. If we gon' make music, let's just make music.

Consciousness rap - a term that I don't think exactly exists but gets thrown around a lot - is not exactly popular.

I feel that racial profiling may be a very complicated and long-standing problem. It will take a long time even to make tiny progress.

When I first heard rap, I wasn't quick to be critical. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I had a feeling it was a reflection of what's been happening in the ghetto.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

If you want to stop crime in America you must stop it at the top ... You cannot stop it at the bottom because the bottom is a reflection of the top.

I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than the mayor of any town in Georgia.

Hip Hop emerged fearlessly and unappoligeticly reflecting our society.

African American Communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been before. Ever, ever, ever.

I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.

I didn't have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things that 'Super Fly' is about. It was easier than most scripts because it was about an environment that I knew.