Justice Smith Quotes

I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the '70s and '80s.

Sometimes I do feel hopeless when I look out and scream out through my music, and I scream out through these interviews, and I scream out to people to kind of get their attention back on the things that are meaningful. There's people dying on the streets of Chicago - young people, young men and women who are losing their lives.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

I don't understand Chicago, but I really do hope that the Commander-in-Chief addresses his home town. I think those young kids don't see outside their small box. I think they don't see outside their circumstances, so they kind of resort to anything.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.

Cut throats, gun smoke, dope, and hoes, is what controls niggas souls.

In my day, we didn't have the cocaine, so we went out and knocked somebody over the head and took the money. But today, all this cocaine and crack, it doesn't give kids a chance.

N.W.A. were the first great rap audio documentarians of the problems in our inner cities.

It was very difficult when I was young because there are problems with violence, gangs, guns, drugs - a criminal life. I had friends that choose a criminal life. Some of them are in prison, and some of them are dead. They chose the bad way.

'Cartel Land' explores what happens when - in a Mexican society without order, law or security - vendettas, terror, and corruption go hand in hand with the pursuit of a better world.

Whether it is kids carrying knives because they are in gangs or kids carrying knives because they are afraid of gangs, it is the gang culture that underpins the problem.

The protest songs of the 1960s and 70s managed to blend political and societal views with music from the heart.

I've been through all the bad parts of the streets.

Harlem has always been the nexus of music, politics, culture, criminal figures.

The problem of the Panthers is that they scared people. The music of N.W.A didn't scare people; it taught people what it was like to grow up in our inner cities.

New Orleans is a great place, a place of celebration. But on the other hand, there's a reality to it, there's violence, there's misguided youth.

N.W.A were the audio-documentarians of their time. They were trying to shock people with the violence of their language and the subjects they were talking about. The fact that they dressed in guerilla outfits like the Black Panthers made them shocking by their appearance as well.

We rappers are role models.

99% of my life I was lied to. I just found out my mom does more dope than I do(Damn!). I told her I'd grow up to be a famous rapper, make a record about doing drugs and name it after her (-Oh, thank you!).

We're going to build the bridge to the 21st century, we have to make our children free - free of the vise grip of guns and gangs and drugs; free to build lives of hope.

If you wanna get away with murder, all you gotta do is shoot somebody in the head and put a demo tape in their pocket! 'This is a rap killing! Let's get outta here!'