Mahershala Ali Quotes

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

I liked the Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest and Cypress Hill.

I would say old school cats like Redman and Wu-tang. My style is my style, those are just cats that I liked.

When we were making 'Juvenile Hell,' we were listening to the Jungle Brothers, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Biz Markie, A Tribe Called Quest.

I had love for Breakout; I had love for Bambaataa. I had love for Kool Herc.

In my day, in my era, Ralph McDaniels, just being five and being at his block party, you could just got onstage.

Hip hop was definitely, far and away, the primary influence for at least 10 years of my life. From about 7 or 8 on till about 15 or 16, that's all I listened to.

One thing I always loved about hip-hop music was the raw, boom-bap element - it felt powerful and manly.

I'm a huge hip-hop fan from way back in the day.

I love hip-hop. I have gone through many difference phases in my love affair with hip-hop.

At a earlier age, I was kind of into a pretty large scope or range of music from Hieroglyphics and the Hobo Junction guys and all that to like a lot of stuff that was in New York like Diamond D, Nas, Brand Nubian, of course Biggie, OC, Organized Confusion, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Digable Planets, who I just saw recently, and they killed it.

My dad used to be a rapper, he had a rap group. They did proper old school, boom-bap music. He had a high top and everything.

For me, I put Mac Dre right up there with Biggie and 'Pac as legends who have since passed on.

Hip-hop has taken a lot of different routes throughout the years, man. I've been around since 1986.

Nineties hip-hop in particular really shaped what became the common pop cultural language that we all speak.

We grew up with break-dancing and MCing, the old school, that whole era of just having a good time and knowing that the music was good.

I'm definitely inspired by old hip-hop.

Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z, Nas, Eminem, Big L, Tupac. That was, like, my top five, generally.

I've been in the game a long time. I've done all sorts of different types of music. From mob music to the G-Funk era.

When you scratch the soul of hip-hop, you find R&B and funk but also reggae.

The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.

The thing that's good about Hip Hop is that it has experimented with a lot of different sounds and music.

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

I'm huge into '90s rap. It's my jam.

By the time I was a teenager, when I went outside the house, it was about hip-hop all the time. Nothing but hip-hop, block parties.