Chuck D Quotes

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

This is a very screwed-up business. Record labels don't sign a lot of bands these days. We just want to find a home and stay there and make records and do our thing and not have to look over our shoulder.

There are no record companies in Waikiki.

Doing things in my day was simple: you either signed to a big label or you signed to a very small label, and you worked with that one, and then they eventually signed you on to a big one.

I love music and musicians. And seeing great artists dropped from labels was really frustrating and sad to me.

I think we in the Alpha Band, which was a strange group anyway, weren't dealing with any of these issues. They sneaked up on us and took us over, before we know what was going on.

There are a lot of actors who try to get records made and try to make record deals, and everybody goes, 'Ugh.' It used to be expected in the entertainment business. I mean look at Sinatra, Bing Crosby. All these guys started out as singers.

Who else is putting seven figures down for unreleased rap tracks?

By the time 1997 had rolled around, I had been in the music business for all my life, from the age of 15. I started recording professionally when I was 18. I had seen how record companies work, how the business works, and truth be told, I was pretty disgusted by everything by that time.

I left the entertainment industry part of my life behind in 1983, when we decided not to work with major record companies anymore.

The hits I had in the '80s - I made those deals directly with American companies.

I have been skeptical and not trusting of traditional models of the entertainment industry. I never got a manager.

I know there are some labels that put out music for art's sake, but I don't know which ones.

There are people who are genetically made to start record labels, and I'm not one of those people. People just have it in their blood and are good at it. Corey Rusk from Touch and Go and Ian MacKaye. These are people who have made their own labels.

There are very few record companies who will entertain a middle-aged woman coming to them with original material.

The problem that I have is with the music business. For some reason it seems almost impossible to get anything, any music, released which includes improvisation or soloing.

I have always abhorred the business end of music.

Island Records was the first record label to... acknowledge me. After that, quickly, Republic Records, and then Atlantic Records, Sony Records and Warner Bros. It was all the labels at once. It was absolutely insane, like, knowing that this many record labels were interested in me.

I don't think that old-fashioned idea of record companies exists any more.

The labels are in a jam. For a company to do well in music now, it's got to be in all aspects of the business. And Live Nation is the risk-taker. It's leading the charge.

If it wasn't for the TLC story, many artists would not have smartened up, and you wouldn't have the Lil Waynes and people with their own labels.

The Shades never recorded anything, Little Daddy and the Bachelors recorded a couple of records, ya.

I was with PolyGram; that was the big label that I was with for the longest, like 12 years.

I was always looking to record, but how much I actually pursued it was another thing. The major labels weren't that interested in me, and the smaller labels didn't have any money to do anything.

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.