Chuck D Quotes

I like Public Enemy a great deal.

I grew up on Public Enemy, which had a message with great music behind it.

I like the way hip-hop is now. It's grown up enough so that it can get involved with politics if it feels like it.

You know, I'm the 1st black solo MC from Detroit. I didn't do the 50 Cent sales but hey... I got a long career, I'm still young and I'm trying to bring really good music.

I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships.

Public Enemy is the security of the hip-hop party.

I don't like political rappers.

Ain't nobody bumping Nas no more, no disrespect to him. He had his time.

I'm lucky in that in my character in hip hop is me. I'm Michael Render. My character is Killer Mike. But the truth that I sing in my raps align themselves with the policy of Bernie Sanders.

I would challenge more hip hop artists that are rapping about what it's like to be real and the social ills that we face, if you aren't backing Bernie Sanders, I have to question your credibility in terms of do you mean the songs you're writing.

I am an artist with very strong social and political concerns.

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

If you think about 2Pac, Biggie, and Nas, all of those guys were teenagers or in their early 20s when they got started. Everybody acts like young people have to be silly and lack perspective. Those guys had incredible perspective, and everything that they said was before 25 years old.

Kendrick Lamar is not a whack rapper, not at all. Do I think he's a super-mega-lyricist? Not really.

I love Honey G, Honey G is great. I think she's not a singer, she's a rapper.

Earl Sweatshirt is very wise.

Kendrick Lamar is a great, great thinker. He's a tremendous artist.

Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.

Everyone uses grime as a footstool, but imagine Biggie Smalls started doing hip hop, and it started going well, and then he started making RnB: there would be no hip hop!

I like Macklemore.

I love Drake's music.

Sometimes music isn't the way to talk politics, you know?

From the beginning with 'So Far Gone,' Drake's work has been to find a way to deftly balance his singing and his rapping.

I do like Drake's 'Forever.'