Chuck D Quotes

In the hip-hop community, it's about how real are you, or how strong can you be, and really my music just reflects me. If you can accept me, then you can accept my music.

Because I'm a dramatist, I'm allowed to take liberties, but I want my films to be based in truth, and it's very important to me that the community we're focusing on is happy with the film. From an ethical point of view, that's everything.

A lot of MTV's programming is hip-hop based, and the messages are usually all about bling bling. A lot of hip-hop artists sing about stuff that's more important, but they seldom get heard. The ones who get heard are the ones saying, 'Think about yourself. Make your money. It's all you. Everybody have a good time and party.'

I'm a small-time white kid trying to represent hip-hop. If a hip-hop artist comes up and beats me in a battle, who did they beat? A small-town white kid who ain't never been an MC, who ain't never done nothing. Now if an MC comes to battle and they get beat by a small-town white boy, that's MC suicide.

You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?

There shouldn't be any violence in hip-hop. You're getting free clothes. Basically, it's free money.

I think about never losing my voice, never giving in, never selling out, always keeping black, always sticking to the street. Staying neighborhood and not Hollywood.

Latinos don't go out and support their own films, but at the same time, it's not their responsibility.

An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community ... must speak in the tone of that community, not as somebody else's buffer zone.

I want to represent all the Latin people. I want to do this for the rest of my life.

I always want to tell the truth. It doesn't have to be a pretty truth, and it doesn't have to be a life-changing and life-threatening truth like 'Chi-Raq.' But I want to tell someone's truth in an effort to inspire people to see themselves reflected on the screen.

Every generation wants that real hip-hop. And I've always been able to bring that.

In hip hop, 'real' has always meant one who represents in actuality what they present in imagery. For instance, once upon a time, if a rapper spoke about being gangsta, they needed to truly be that, or they were 'frontin.'

The funniest thing in the world to me is the idea of a white guy in his thirties going, 'Wait - I'm going to go into hip-hop.'

I'm aware of what my effect on the populous could be, and I try to use it in a positive way, whether it be in an Instagram post or a tweet, or promoting whatever new job that I have. I don't figure too much as a Latino man coming up, or a certain ethnic man. I'm very, very proud of being a Mexican-American man, but I would rather people just see me as a man coming up who just happens to be Mexican.

No matter how far you go, if you can't go back to the essence, you're not sayin' nothin'. The essence for me is hip-hop. But the hip-hop community I came up in isn't a loyal community.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

It's a little hard for me to stand behind the walls of the great mansion and play rock and roll star. I feel the need to give back.

I bet you never heard of a playa with no game, Told the truth to get what I want, but shot it with no shame. Take this music dead serious while others entertain. I see they makin' they paper so I guess I can't complain...or can I? I feel they disrespectin' the whole thang. Them hooks like sellin' dope to black folks, And I choke when the food they serve ain't tastin' right, My stomach can't digest it even when I bless it.

I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.

Nowadays, [young musicians] are so quick to be like, "OK, fine, I'll take the cheque, or I'll get the stamp from XYZ, and I'm expanding my brand," rather than thinking, "I'm part of this space over here, and in order for it to grow, you can't have it assimilated by this bigger bubble or corporate brand."

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

I might tell a story about somebody else, but I don't sit there and do a story about somebody snitching on me selling coke because people know I didn't sell coke. So I just try to keep it real but still try to do it in a creative way.

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.