Vic Mensa Quotes

Rap music was and is, for me, everything.

I was bringing the whole music, hip-hop, art, break dancing and urban cultural thing to the downtown table.

Rap is definitely a youthful expression.

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

It would be pretty funny to see a Beverly Hills white girl with mad rap skills.

I'm a big hip-hop fan since being a kid. It was the first music that spoke to me and made me feel like, 'Yeah.'

I started rapping since, like, 14. But I've been obsessed with rap from when I was 11. I heard 'Baby Don't Cry,' I'll never forget.

Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years. It's a name that the streets taught me, a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment.

The thing about hip-hop today is it's smart, it's insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

I remember listening to Cube's music when I was like 14 years old, my friends listening to it up in Toronto.

In kindergarten I had to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I drew a rapper. I didn't really know what a rapper was or what they did - I just wanted to do it.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

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

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

In the early '80s, it was hard to find celebrities you can identify with if you lived in the hood. There weren't any rap videos at the time.

Hip hop is the strongest form of protest there is, and it doesn't always have to be a violent protest. It can be romantic, also. When you listen to Kanye West's 'Street Lights' for example, there's romance, there's pain - you feel the essence. I get the same thing from Drake and 2 Chainz.

I really like the whole urban, hip-hop kind of thing.

The whole '400 Degreez' album was inspired by what Outkast was doing, Organized Noize. That was what I was listening to around that time.

I like Badshah's songs, as they are very cool, catchy, and very young. I think that's very important... It's connecting with the youth.

The single 'Tha Block Is Hot' was a song that was true to life.

When the Internet came along, the first thing I did was look up Wu-Tang so I could print out their symbol and glue it onto my skateboard.

Nas was a huge influence. That's probably my favorite rapper of all time.

I had a lot of respect for Prodigy. He brought the hood to the booth. When we were trying to shape this rap thing into something, he was one of the cats I respected for bringing the hood into the booth.

Where I'm from in Harlem, everybody look like a rapper.

Skateboarding was my introduction to rap and the first rap song that I really liked was KRS-One 'Step Into A World.'