No I.D. Quotes

I'm on the radio because I love hip-hop. I represent that community, but there are so many other aspects to who I am as a person.

Hip-hop was the culture that I grew up with; I am part of this culture.

People underestimate the hip-hop audience and the capacity to understand politics when it's part of music.

The Temple of Hip-Hop makes sure that we don't just approach hip-hop just through music or through rap. We approach the totality of hip-hop.

Everyone who raps isn't hip-hop. To be hip-hop, you've got to know the culture. You got to know the history.

The thing about the state of hip-hop is that people are too concerned. I don't think that there's a problem with being too concerned about videogames, especially for me, because I'm not in the industry. I'm just a consumer. But hip-hop is constantly like, "What are you doing for the scene?"

Hip hop - it's an art form but it's a culture as well. You grow up in the culture and you never leave it. It's a style of dress; it's a way of thought. I always grew up in the culture, and it was part of who I was and I carried it into every world I was in.

I don't care what anybody says, there's nothing like the cultural influence of hip-hop. For me, hip-hop culture is involved in everything - it's in me, in who I am, in how I dress, how I talk. It's in my son and my wife.

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.

I'm born and raised in Georgia, so I have a lot of appreciation for hip-hop, but I want to be able to show the emotional side of me.

Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.

Eventually, I started to actually enjoy rapping.

When you look at hip-hop, I want to do that: to spit fire and take our best from the ashes to build our kingdom; to recognize all the regional styles, conscious lyrics, the tracks, underground, mainstream, the way we treat each other. Lose the garbage and rebuild our scene.

I often say that I want to write like Tupac rapped. I could listen to his album, and within a few minutes, I could go from thinking deeply to laughing to crying to partying.

I honestly now know that I'm the physical embodiment of hip-hop on earth. That's my only purpose here on earth is to keep the culture together long enough for it to remain everything that we thought it could be when I was coming up.

You gotta understand a lot of hip-hop kids are going to have the hip-hop mentality. And it's sad because they're not educated enough to understand what hip-hop culture is really about.

I don't like to be considered a 'hip-hop mogul.' I don't know what that means.

Record companies feel they are the culture. Hip-hop has to begin to define, protect, and promote itself, and that's why we founded the Temple.

For those of us who grew in the early hip hop era, that music shaped us in a way to be in a position to express ourselves.

When I was young, I wanted to be like the rappers. I remember being in junior high and wanting a fisherman hat and a link because EPMD had one. I wanted to wear Adidas because Run-DMC wore Adidas. As I came into my own, I just wanted to do me.

I was born in Hip Hop. That's all I ever needed.

The moment I made that decision to get in the studio and actually work and study the culture of hip-hop, then everything just started to open up and blossom for me.

For me, hip-hop culture is involved in everything - it's in me, in who I am, in how I dress, how I talk. It's in my son and my wife.

To be hip-hop is much more than just rapping in the production. It is more in the attitude.

I've been able to be a part of every movement in music over the last several decades. The only one that I haven't been involved in so much is hip-hop, which I chose not to be involved in because it felt like I would be what they called "perpetrating." It felt like hip-hop was so much of its own culture and that I was not part of that culture.