Talib Kweli Quotes

I'm a creature of the New York City streets.

I'm a product of the city for sure.

I come from a traditional hip-hop background.

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

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

It might take a while but I think the rap game is the people that can do it. We're all role models more than athletes because athletes don't wear clothes like the kid in the hood and they don't walk and talk like the kids in the hood. We're closer to them than anybody because they can look at us and see them.

My parents are my biggest influences. My parents and my city. Brooklyn, New York, New York City, the community I grew up. I don't feel like I'm special in that. I feel like that's everybody.

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

New York has inspired more remarkable music than any other city I can think of.

No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.

In this time, we incorporate money and media, and it's split up like apartheid, where when you say "hip-hop," you think just rap records. People might have forgot about all the other elements in hip-hop. Now we're back out there again, trying to get people back to the fifth element, the knowledge. To know to respect the whole culture, especially to you radio stations that claim to be hip-hop and you're not, because if you was a hip-hop radio station, why do you just play one aspect of hip-hop and rap, which is gangsta rap?

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

Now it seems like hip hop belongs to the people you see in the videos and radios. So I want to give it bring it back to the hood, make a statement for NY to put us back in our proper perspective, and of course let them know that Ra still spits fire.

I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of the culture, and it's the name of the identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls.

I spent a lot of time standing on street corners [of New York City] talking to local residents. I spent time in bookstores and galleries. But most of the time, I really did not have much to do.

Libraries are the pride of the city.

I'm not a New Yorker. I grew up in Detroit. A lot of people think it's one big city but they're completely different.

A trap lord is basically the lord of the trap, and my trap is rap.

They had all this talent, and they had no instruments. So they started rap music. They rhymed on their own. They made their own sounds and their own movements.

The only city people are those born so.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

With rap music, because it's all so on the street, you get treated like a street cat: "All right, you've been eatin' enough, you're fat, get out of the way now and let somebody else come by."

We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?

I grew up in the Bronx. I'm into rap music.