Mac Miller Quotes

There's more to hip-hop than just trying to make everything rhyme, and you find out in life that everything don't rhyme. The music they're cutting is musically fantastic.

I say if you don't write your lyrics, then you can't be the best rapper alive. Not at all. You can be one of the best artists, especially in rap, you gotta write everything yourself.

Just knowing how to rap doesn't necessarily mean that you're a good songwriter.

I've always been jealous of rappers, because they can fit so many words into a song and tell a story with lots of details. But when you're a songwriter, you have to fit the words to the melody and you can't fit as much in. I'm just a big fan of storytelling.

Big Rube was on my first album and some of my mixtapes. His words are so powerful. I want to speak every word he says into existence. I wanna be a part of that! I wanna be a part of greatness. His wordplay is great to me.

Usually, when I'm rappin', I'm creating a big story or a concept song that sounds like a movie to me.

Hip-hop is not all '2 Chainz' - although '2 Chainz' is awesome. How he does that with metaphors, I don't know.

I've been known to drop a spoken-word bit into a song from time to time. But not straight-up rap. I don't know that I have that gift.

I feel like with a lot of Madlib's beats, they are made for storytelling. I feel like when I'm working on stuff with him, I can really get into the storytelling aspect mode of my flow.

I try to tell the truth in my lyrics; write good melodies and make hard beats. So, basically, I just combine hip-hop with melody. That's how I classify myself.

When I first started making music, I was pretty drawn to hip-hop beats wrapped together with super-good lyrics. The most important thing in that is wordplay, so that stayed with me when I started writing songs.

I'm really big into lyrics in my own songs, so I look up to Drake in that aspect.

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

You hear what Thug says in his songs - the musical level of it is so crazy that it doesn't register with some people, so they call it trash. But anybody who loves music can appreciate what he's doing.

When I first started making music, I was all about wordplay and how fast I could rap, but over the years, I've really gained an appreciation for melody. What's cool is that when you're singing, you have to be concise, and when you're rapping, you have the opportunity to be really detailed with your lyrics.

Lil Wayne, that was one of my main influences, music-wise, because of his wordplay and metaphors.

I think the best rappers practice concept albums in their work.

I'm not the greatest writer or the great rapper.

When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.

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

What sets 'Some Nights' apart from anything we've ever done is the hip-hop influence. Not so much the actual sound of hip-hop, but more the vibrato and the artistry that comes with it. Right now, the artists that seem to be pushing to be the greatest artists and are trying to change the world are hip-hop artists.

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.

I still very much appreciate the storytelling of the best rappers.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I think that rap is narrative, when it's done right.