Toby Keith Quotes

I love hip hop, and I have a bunch of urban songs I write for fun that I can't put on my albums because people would laugh and point.

As soon as me and Willow started releasing music, that's one thing that the whole world took away is, okay, they unlocked another step of honesty. If these guys can be honest about everything, then we can be more honest.

This is the industry that wants [music], the rap industry.

It is immensely enjoyable to work for an album because there's a lot more creative freedom. In films sometimes, all that the makers care about is making the music commercially appealing.

My music and my fan base is really built off of my lifestyle.

The pop world is cool, but I never really thought of myself as part of it or wanting to be a part of it because I'm on a label that's not really like that. They're not trying to dress me up, they're not trying to do things like that. I feel like I'm sort of separate from that, actually.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

This is sort of not expected, but I would love to produce a record for Missy Elliott. It would be totally different, but she makes party music. 'Lose Control' was my favorite song when I was in 5th or 6th grade.

When people say to me 'what do you think of rap music?' my answer is there's no such thing. There's rap and there's music.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

Most of the people who write pop music were outsiders at some time in their life.

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'

Rappers should just be able to perform what they create and satisfy the people that like and love them.

I really didn't try to make an effort to make urban music, but I am a product of my inspirations.

I'm a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.

Metal is still the biggest music now in America.

I think that pop music in general sometimes like to keep things a bit more hidden, and, you know, you censor and you polish to make it fit more people or to not be too vulgar or make sure of, 'Can this really play on the radio?' And I like not doing that.

Back in the day, if someone said that hip hop and rap was a fad, that was a joke to me because they just didn't know what they were talking about. In reality, there were so many people who didn't know what they were talking about it.

What I don't do is try to like become whoever I'm rapping with. The people who go get an LL album want to hear LL.

I'm hoping to knock down the walls and broaden the lane a little bit more for music that's pop music at the heart of it.

So dance music is now pop music. So now, as a dance producer, what do I have to do? So I'm starting to do alien music, because pop is not pop anymore; we need to go alien to be independent.

I'm putting everything on the line in being able to express myself in a different way than rappers normally do. They might say, 'It's rap' or 'It's R&B,' but I'm stepping outside the box and making music for me and making music for the fans to understand me. I'm going the extra distance to be able to come across different.

I was king of the mountain for a long time, well, I don't want that no more. I like to perform every once in a while for people who want to see me, and cut albums of music that is what I'm really about.

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.