Goapele Quotes

I listen to R&B and Hip Hop.

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.

I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that.

I'd love to do a live album, like a little bit old school but still progressive, influenced maybe by more electronic music. I like everything, but I don't know anything about music. So it comes in to a lot of different ingredients. I love hip hop.

My dad raised me on everything from his music to Stevie Wonder to A Tribe Called Quest. I learned the 'Midnight Marauders' album in and out.

At times I put in Meek Mill and listen to some R&B, some Merengue, Dominican music. I really listen to pretty much everything.

We had some Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross, but there's a lot of hip-hop and other black music that I just never grew up on. My parents didn't listen to anything other than black gospel.

I started with soul music and icons like Aretha Franklin and Etta James and then moved to R&B and artists such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. Electronic music came later on, when I was in high school and I was really influenced by artists like Skrillex and Major Lazer.

If you take 'Nothin' But a G Thang' by Dr Dre, that could also be an R&B record. 'Bonita Applebum' by A Tribe Called Quest could even be a jazz record. 'Bring Da Ruckus,' you gotta call it hip-hop.

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.

I love the sounds of Latin jazz, R&B, hip-hop, alternative, all that stuff. I'm a radio kid.

As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

To its credit, hip-hop is my favorite genre, to this day, and it's hard not to be influenced by the culture and by the movement of it and by the soul of it.

The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music.

I listened to a lot of Jay-Z and Kanye coming up, which would be unexpected for a boy bander like me. But I'd listen to a lot of that, and a lot of Ed Sheeran, actually.

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.

My dad has always been a big Ray Charles fan, and I've grown up listening to all kinds of music.

Soul music is soul music. It can be wrapped up in a neo soul package; it can be called hip-hop soul. But soul is soul, and it's been around; it will never go away.

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

I mostly listen to very popular songs. But I'm a huge fan of Stevie Wonder, and I love jazz - Glenn Fredly, Diah Lestari - so 80% jazz, 20% mixed with everything - disco, hip hop.

I'm a big hip hop fan.

I love Soul, R+B, Electronic, and good pop. Really, the only thing I don't listen to is country and heavy metal. I love Marvin Gaye, John Legend, Al Green, Fat Freddys Drop, Sade, Grace Jones, Bazoo Bijou, Prince, John Lennon, London Grammar, Daft Punk, Dr John, Dusty Springfield, Peggy Lee, Gotye, and on it goes.

There were a lot of R&B groups that were my heroes, but the funny thing about my career and the way it went and where it went, at first I didn't really want to do pop music. I was a little bit more into jazz and R&B.

Charles and I are from Augusta, Ga. - so we come from James Brown territory, soul music and Motown. And Charles has always had a lot of Southern rock in there as well.