Tory Lanez Quotes

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn't really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, something real rather than an imitation.

If you listen to all my earlier stuff, it wasn't 'authentic reggae,' so to speak.

You can usually tell when people aren't being authentic, but that goes for every artist, not just white artists.

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

When you're in Jamaica, unless you're in a tourist spot, you don't hear Bob Marley; you mostly hear dance hall music.

I was interested in maintaining the dignity and the hearts of the songs, letting them breathe and become what they are.

To me, our music is like Jamaican stuff - if they can't hear it, they're not supposed to hear it. It's not for them if they can't understand it.

When reggae was introduced to the world, it was a voice of the oppressed, a music with integrity that you can enjoy holistically. Throughout the years, what has become commercial kind of strayed from the integrity.

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them.

We get accused of inauthenticity because we play the instruments we play.

My dad used to play reggae and Afrobeats. Every Sunday, we used to have these records, vinyls. And he would just play all of them - Super Cat, Ninja Man, Buju Banton.

What I mean by being real is just when you are doing dance celebrations, sports celebrations, like the cooking dance or anything like that. When you're an artist, you want to always try your best to do the homework and see where it originated from.

'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

Here's the key to Jamaica, the secret to Jamaican dancehall parties, no matter where you are in the world. If you do not see Japanese people, you're at the wrong party. They source authenticity like no other culture I've ever seen.

There are artists in Belgium who try to imitate American artists. But it's like, if you're Belgian pretending to be American, you won't be better than the American because you aren't American. You have to do your own stuff.

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

Jamaican music can be aggressive, soulful, smooth and exciting all at once - just like hip-hop. At the same time, there's nothing like Jamaica in the United States. Jamaica is its own thing.

I feel like a lot of the singer-songwriters in my genre and in my generation have gotten more and more snooty about covering other people's songs. They believe that creativity is the intersect of expression.

I think hip hop allows us to talk about everything, and Africa is what I choose to talk about now. If people are not talking about Africa, that's them, that's cool, there's nothing wrong with that. But this is who I am, this is what I have to say, this is what I have to offer.

Jazz is not background music.

You have to evolve and change but you're always gonna get that street edge out of my music regardless. That's who I am. That's in me and that ain't gon' never go away.

I sang a song in Hindi; nobody even knew what that was. Singing about Native American issues, nobody did that... I had no reason to want to copy anybody else... All I had was my originality.