Miles Davis Quotes

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

Hip-hop isn't dead by any means, but it's not something I define my black identity with.

Black culture - we dance and sing. We're entertainers. James Brown said it best: the things we are make people want to be like us.

Have you heard his new song? 'Cause he thinks he's a black man now.

Being a blues singer is like being black two times.

Personally more so than shock, I think, rap music has to be born of rebellion.

With 'Black Panther,' black artists were provided with the opportunity and agency to create art that captures the full range of their imaginative possibilities. It matters that Chadwick Boseman is the protagonist and is supported by a cast of nearly all black characters.

I've had so many parents DM me on social media thanking me because I simply have dreadlocks, because their daughters wear dreadlocks and play with dreadlocks, and I'm like, 'Well why not? Let's do it.' It's really cool to be able to inspire the younger generation of kids of color that look like us.

I really just prefer to be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category that represents the essence of who I am.

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

Nina Simone sacrificed so much to be as bold as she was about being black and about being female in an era where that could have cost her life.

I never tried to emulate that New York rap style. What I do is a quasi rap. It's a honky rap, not a black rap. I find it puzzling that so many people have assumed I'm black.

The whole thing about 'progressive R&B' blows my mind. Black music has always been progressive.

I've always been told I sound black.

Neo-soul is really less about a sound than it is about a look, in my opinion.

Obama a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

Prince is extremely soulful, but he can get real rock-'n'-rollish. So can Lenny Kravitz. Lenny's real soulful but he's got that rock with him, too. On the whole, I guess black folks ain't trying to handle rock-'n'-roll, really.

It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.

I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead.

God created black people and black people created style.

I hate to get on the racial thing because that's something I've always been totally against. But the problem with the media is that they think that the word rock means white and the word rap means black.

I have my own style, but it's different for each kind of music. There are certain little characteristic things every player has.

When you hear my records today hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.