Chuck D Quotes

You can't do gospel and rap. Either you're of the gospel music, or you're a rapper. You can't put the two together. You can, but is it right? It's questionable.

No, it's interesting to remake a film for the contemporary audience today. I think it's a good idea; it needs to respect the original idea. Don't just take the title and change everything else.

When we went to cover it I thought we would change it to a song of loving and longing instead of the sex machine song Kylie turned it into. I've met Kylie and told her we were covering her song and she was pleased.

A band is not a marriage. There are no oaths of allegiance. If you feel your life will be better served by splitting up the group, you've got to do it - but of course it does cause problems.

It's really rare that an entire genre of music allows an artist from a different genre to come and live there.

When young people hear auto-tune, they think that's real R&B. You have to get rid of all of the gimmicks.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

To be a songwriter-singer means the songs come from deep within, and you treat them as an artist, with that much respect. I couldn't hardly cheat myself.

I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.

Every time I do a cover, I completely... pick apart - I take apart the entire song and really reconstruct it. I try and make it my own.

When you're with somebody as iconic as Mick Jagger or John Fogerty, I'm really aware that, in asking these guys to collaborate with me, I don't want to add a footnote to their career that's like, 'Shouldn't' have done that.' It's important to make sure that they're well represented.

I was criticized by some people for my first album because they said I was taking sacred music. They knew nothing about what I was doing. That was no sacred music; that's music I wrote.

The reason we see more recreations is because people want to re-introduce some iconic songs to the younger generation. I support recreations too, as long as they're done well and respectfully. I have done a couple myself too, but when I recreate a song, I do it like a tribute to the makers of the original song.

Colin Blunstone did a cover of one of my songs, and the reason I liked it was he changed it completely from my version.

It's fun to take songs from a completely different context and reframe them. We did two mixtape albums called 'Other People's Heartache' and 'Other People's Heartache Pt. 2,' which were full of those kind of covers and mash-ups, mixed with film music and film quotes.

When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.

Performing with Thomas Rhett our song 'Craving You,' I'm so excited for the fans to see it and sort of see our worlds come together because I feel like he's sort of a genre pusher and boundary pusher, and I feel the same way about my music.

One of my favorite hip-hop artists is Makonnen. One of my favorite bands is Fall Out Boy. You put those two together, and that's Lil Peep.

I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.

Talking about remixes, some people like to preserve what is original and some people give it a new meaning. Coming to Hip Hop, the biggest of the artists use sampling. You are changing the genre of the song and to be able to give old music in new package is also fair and people who have emotions attached to it - they are also not wrong.

I've always wanted to make records that rock like hell. But also, I've never wanted to compromise that Country place deep inside.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

Rather than highlighting music's differences, Kids & Explosions' Josh Raskin mixes songs together based on their surprising common ground, making them blend rhythmically and melodically.

I grew up in Mountain Pine, Arkansas. You get no more country than where I grew up. But I also grew up in the Napster / iTunes / Spotify/ iHeart Radio era, and so I see that everything is influenced by everything else, and that's what country music is now.