Keith Sweat Quotes

At the end of the day, you want to be always the one that's one step ahead of everybody, and when it comes to hip-hop, culture and art, you want to be that signature guy.

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.

I'm forever learning and that's why I'm always able to create new styles and new dimensions of hip-hop.

N.Y. hip-hop is ok, but we gotta become brave again; we have to be brave enough and do something new - that's what New York is about... New.

My intentions with any of my music is to keep it futuristic and updated and be experimental and try new things.

KISS has always been outside of the borders of what other bands can do. Not that some of these other bands wouldn't want to do it - the fact that they may snicker or look down their noses at what we do is more out of jealously than anything else.

We did it with passion; we didn't do it like everyone else. Teams nowadays are still trying to duplicate that, but no one has yet. We shuffled down and we did it. We did it in an unique fashion.

We have this really retro vibe and style of songwriting and, personally, I wasn't embracing the current state of music until I fell in love with hip-hop. It felt good to suddenly embrace where music was headed, and I think hip-hop is the best at that, because it feels so progressive and everybody wants to be the best.

The only people playing the roles of classic rock stars are hip-hop artists, now. Kanye's stage persona, and the way he approaches making albums, and the way he wants to be better than everyone else? That's reminiscent of Freddie Mercury. That's reminiscent of the Beatles.

I never want to give people something I've already given them; I wanna give them something new, you know? So the people who've been enjoying my music for years, I hope they continue to enjoy.

I'm not the first guy to make a record or to make hip-hop, but I did it differently.

You can't just be a rock star by rehashing things you've seen or done before. Bring something new, which is what hip-hop does best.

Kishore Kumar was multi-talented and original, so I really respect him.

I had a lot of respect for Prodigy. He brought the hood to the booth. When we were trying to shape this rap thing into something, he was one of the cats I respected for bringing the hood into the booth.

My mentally for my character is you have to be first, better, or different. I know that I'm not the best at everything; in fact, I'm not the best at a lot of things, so I'm going to be different, or I'm going to be the first one to do it.

There are not many people that I respect more than rappers. I'm a huge fan of hip hop. It's incredible, one of the most influential things to me. It takes real genius to be able to do well. It's a very deep art form.

When some artistes give a hit song, they keep repeating themselves in the same genre. I always try to create something new.

Definitely 'HUMBLE' was a masterpiece.

Being born in the adolescent years of hip hop helped us learn about flux. And when you're in an industry that is constantly growing, changing, maturing... you get a chance to try different things out and a chance to fail.

Rap is the only super-current music. If you're into reggae or dancehall, and you don't know Bob Marley, then you don't really know what you're listening to. But if you're listening to rap, and you're 15, you're like, 'Grandmaster Flash? Who's that? Public Enemy? Yeah, my dad told me about them once.' And that's just how it is.

I think people were genuinely addicted to hip hop in the 90s, addicted to the idea of empowerment. I think it came from [the fact that] the rappers in the 90s, their parents coming from the 70s, had such a rich variety of records to sample.

I'm just trying different styles and switching it up, but getting back to rap and the essence and the swag that I brought to the game from records like "Rack City" and "Faded," records like that. I got some good collaborations that people are gonna be excited about.

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

For me, growing up in hip-hop culture, it's all about having the next style, the new fashion, the new way to express yourself, the fly new beat. I can't sit still; I have no nostalgia. I don't have to have nostalgia.

Before I think we was emcees, we was more or less narrators too. Because if you look at the early '80s hip hop, it was so much creativity goin' on with artists like then, like Slick Rick, then you had Rakim, and you had these different kind of artists back then. And we was a marble cake of all these artists. So I didn't have a problem with writin' stories because I felt like that was somethin' I loved to do. Even to this day, I really consider myself an entertainer-slash-narrator. I like to talk about stuff that goes on.