Killer Mike Quotes

The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.

I'm a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can't really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that's religious.

For me, I just want to sing about life. And since I come from a spiritual background, I turned to jazz, because I feel it's still sacred, like gospel. It's serious music, but it allows room to sing about so much other stuff as well.

And whether you're drawn to gospel music or church music or honky-tonk music, it informs your character and it informs your talent.

When I was a kid, I was following black soul music.

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.

From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did, and I'd say, 'Well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical' - but that makes no sense to anyone.

With the R&B, gospel feel that 'Sparkle' has, that opens the door for my fans to be more accepting of that sound and also for me to try it.

I listen to jazz and gospel... yeah that's basically what I listen to.

I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical base.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

The first thing I heard was spiritual music, which was imbedded. The second thing I heard was swing. And shortly, along with that, I began to hear the blues. And then I began to hear Latin music. Each one left its mark.

I want to do more urban R&B with a little bit of pop, but not much. I want to have that soulful kind of side of me come out.

I love gospel music, I love gangsta music.

Black people have always loved the blues - they basically created the blues.

I listen to R&B and Hip Hop.

We had some Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross, but there's a lot of hip-hop and other black music that I just never grew up on. My parents didn't listen to anything other than black gospel.

I really like jazz and soul, but I also love so many other types of music, and I didn't want to be afraid to blend and experiment.

Though I'd always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a 'black' form - the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian - I had never felt this truth.