Rakim Quotes

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

I'm trying to escape the shackles of a pen and a pad. I've sat in sessions with Jay-Z where he doesn't write anything down. He'll come up with the most incredible triple entendre, all in his head - it's amazing.

When I found Freestyle Fellowship, I started getting into the construction of rap. You get better at it the more you do it; you figure out the science and the math behind it.

Some MCs don't take the time to take a beat home or just vibe with it and just figure out, 'How do I attack this track?'

No one will ever be able to come against me on the beats.

When I first started making music, I was pretty drawn to hip-hop beats wrapped together with super-good lyrics. The most important thing in that is wordplay, so that stayed with me when I started writing songs.

It's certain rappers that can really rap, that really spit all bars, so I understand why someone would say, 'You not a real rapper.' But the main thing is, if you can make good songs, who cares? So I don't know why guys be tripping on Drake. He makes great music. He's dope.

I'm really like a rat in the rap game. I just drop stuff when I feel like it.

If you're really a rapper, you can't stop rapping.

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.

A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes.

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

Being a student of hip-hop in general, you take technical aspects from places. You may take a rhyme pattern or flow from Big Daddy Kane or Kool G Rap.

I guess I am a rapper. It's weird to be called that, or tell someone that's your profession.

Look at music: I've always loved hiphop and rap, and now there's this whole progressive movement, with De La Soul and Mos Def, Common. It's some of the best stuff around.

You know how a person is made for something? Eminem is made for hip-hop. The best rapper is a white man.

I'm obviously not a rapper, and I don't have any claims to be one, really.

I listen a lot to rap, and I'm inspired to take it, to use it in another way, to get the message across.

There's more to hip-hop than just trying to make everything rhyme, and you find out in life that everything don't rhyme. The music they're cutting is musically fantastic.

I'm the top rapper in the world.

I've been known to drop a spoken-word bit into a song from time to time. But not straight-up rap. I don't know that I have that gift.

I guess rap has such a bad name, because everybody can do it now, and that's probably why people don't want to be considered as rappers anymore, they're not taken seriously anymore. But yeah, rap is definitely the core of what I want to do. But I'm also an artist so I try to do as many things as I can, but I always keep rap in the equation.

People compare me to Kendrick. I've seen comparisons with Jay-Z, with Nas, with Chance The Rapper. I get a lot of Eminem comparisons.

I loved writing lyrics for rap when I was in junior high. I loved studying, but somehow I wanted to be a rapper who can write and rap.

I'm the best SoundCloud rapper.