Phife Dawg Quotes

Look at music: I've always loved hiphop and rap, and now there's this whole progressive movement, with De La Soul and Mos Def, Common. It's some of the best stuff around.

This is hip-hop. If you've got something you want to rap about, just rap about it, man.

I love hip hop, and I have a bunch of urban songs I write for fun that I can't put on my albums because people would laugh and point.

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

I'm still an outsider in the hip hop community. I don't even know if I'm making hip hop anymore.

We culture. Rap is the new rock 'n roll. We the rockstars. It's been like that for a minute, Hedi Slimane!

I think hip hop is dead. It's all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It's all commercial now.

The weird thing about rap is that you don't get compared in the same way that athletes do, even though it's probably the most competitive sport in music. In basketball, they look at a player and say: 'This guy was the best in his prime at this sport.' But in rap it's not until you're dead or retired that people think about it like that.

So what I'm trying to say is from a musical aspect for anybody to say that whatever they're doing in Florida is not Hip Hop or whatever they're doing in LA is not Hip Hop, who are these people to say that?

No, I'll stay Ice-T. This is what got me here, I'm always going to stay true to that. If it weren't for hip-hop I wouldn't be doing all these other things.

I ain't got no beef with east coast, I think it's just being hyped up.

I don't know how to be a rapper. I just know how to be me.

All rappers are princesses like me.

You can't compete with hip-hop. That doesn't mean I don't want to be as big as a rap star. I do - I'm always competitive. But there's this weird perception of me as someone who's sitting around plotting like a devil. It's not like that.

For us to keep claiming this isn't Hip Hop and that isn't Hip Hop doesn't make sense 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 know nothing about hip-hop... There's only so many times you can grab your crotch and prance around stage. I'm gonna get slammed now for this.

Before, you only had one Public Enemy and one Rakim and one Salt 'N' Pepa. Now, people have got the formula, and some of them are just doing it for the cheque. It's kind of watered down.

Much respect to Eminem - he's the greatest.

We gotta keep our sound alive, that dark hip-hop.

I guess rap has such a bad name, because everybody can do it now, and that's probably why people don't want to be considered as rappers anymore, they're not taken seriously anymore. But yeah, rap is definitely the core of what I want to do. But I'm also an artist so I try to do as many things as I can, but I always keep rap in the equation.

I do hip-hop music, and I've gotten famous off of hip-hop music, and I know that I'm successful, and I've created my own definition of success, what success means to me. So the hip-hop world is all just really fake to me.

If you're going to write about rap music and hip-hop, and you don't love it, then we don't need your opinion, and we revoke your opinion.

When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.