Maajid Nawaz Quotes

I've been rapping since I was 13.

I'm a retired MC.

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.

I've always loved hip-hop, since I was a kid, that's the music that I loved. I think everyone of our generation kind of fantasized about hip-hop in some ways.

I started writing rhymes in fact when I was 11 or 12 years old. I was actually into hip hop before anything else.

To me, rapping is an art.

Ever since I was a kid I've been rapping.

Back in the day, when the D.J. would be playing a record, I'd be on the mic trying to hype up the crowd. So once Public Enemy became a rap group, I decided that that's the role that I wanted to take on. I wanted to be the one that was hyping, because I've always been good at it. I can hype up any crowd.

Toasting is basically what you call rapping. It came off of playing the beats at the parties, however it be. You find a space in the beat, and you have somebody live just basically saying rhymes over the beat.

My earliest memories of rap music was mixed with my earliest memories of reggae music. They were big sounds around the way, heavy bass lines, strong messages, definitely.

I've been rapping since I was 18 years old, with a crew called Blades.

I love hip hop music, I make hip hop music.

I actually grew up break-dancing. When you break-dance you listen to hip-hop and rap, so I've been listening to that music since I was a kid.

I started rapping when I was young, like 12, 11. But I wasn't really talking about nothing and it didn't really get me nowhere.

Longevity always come from lyricism. From the people who can actually rap.

I've been a fan of Bunji's freestyling since the first time I saw him perform, back in the early 2000s.

I never knew anything about rapping.

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

Hip-hop was super-exotic to us in Canada.

I was probably like 13 years old, 14. And I used to walk home doing the beatbox from school. That's how I created it. There was no walkmans back then, no iPods, no CDs. There was just me. Back then there was the boom box.

If you're really a rapper, you can't stop rapping.

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

You don't want me to sing. I could do a really bad karaoke scene, if I had to, but I'd probably choose to rap.

Hip-hop is a vehicle.

But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.