Ice Cube Quotes

I don't think hip-hop is a dying art form. I think it's impossible for hip-hop to be a dying art form.

Labels want to capture a certain market of kids and blah blah blah, and it's true, I just never think about that stuff. It's all part of a chain that's moving along, but this phase of music has to switch.

Back in the days when I was a teenager, Before I had status and before I had a pager, You could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop, My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop, I said, well daddy don't you know that things go in cycles, The way that Bobby Brown is just ampin' like Michael, It's all expected, things are for the lookin', If you got the money, Quest is for the bookin'...

All of a sudden it became that hip hop didn't used to be about partying; hip hop used to be about putting out a message.

I try to keep track of what the kids are doing on Soundcloud, and all the new guys coming up.

I never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you're a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don't see so much of that anymore.

If you're a conscious rap artist and you're worried about Billboard charts, you're gonna have a problem.

Hip-hop is youthful. The youth determines which direction it's gonna go. I think your thoughts and your visions starts to change, and you start to pay attention to things, as far as the world goes, a little bit later on in life.

I think skateboarding is better now in terms of the amount of facilities and the amount of support young skaters have - including encouragement from their parents. There was definitely an element to it when I was younger that was exclusive and kind of rebellious because most parents didn't want their kids skating. They thought it was a bad influence.

Well, let's see: I started [in music] at nine and quit. Then got back to it when I was twelve. Then I became a party star. In fact, I became a party!

The '90s were a party, I mean definitely maybe not for the grunge movement, but people were partying harder in the '90s than they were in the '80s. The '90s was Ecstasy, the '80s was yuppies. There was that whole Ecstasy culture. People were having a pretty good time in the '90s.

I LOVE Taylor Swift's 1989. I think it's really cool at the moment that the production on her record is just as strong as the writing. I like the fact that the early nineties sound seems to have come back around

I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.

At parties, everyone always thinks I'm drinking, but actually I rarely drink. I live on energy drinks, basically. I love vitamin water.

Chefs today choose to step onto that treadmill where they have to be seen. Every day they have to go to this party, they have to go to that party. But then you think "Who is doing the cooking?".

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. --bell hooks

I like to go on YouTube to see the underground sounds, what the kids are listening to, and kind of gauge my music around that.

You can't expect to be on MTV and critique George Bush. You can't expect to be on BET or the cover of 'The Source' advocating Jesus Christ or Buddha or Hindu Krishna or Moses. As a conscious rap artist, you have to play in the arena that you're supposed to be in. What is that arena? That arena is the college market. The conscious rap artist woos the college market, even though the college market is the wildest, most sexed-out, drug-driven market in the country, possibly the world.

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

There is still consciousness in hip hop.

I really don't think that Detroit was any different than New York of Boston or Philadelphia. Kids always wanted to listen to music outside because that's where they hung out with their friends.

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

The 70s were a wonderful time to be young. I think most young people at that time were pushing the boundaries, asking all sorts of questions of society, of life and of themselves. They were very politicised. It was part of the air that we breathed.