Black Thought Quotes

I'd like to see people pay attention to the science of hip hop. The knowledge part, the political side of what hip hop could do, or where hip hop is gonna go. I always say it's gonna become universal as we become a galactic union.

I just really longed to do music that reflected me as an adult and music that I thought was for other adults.

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I look at WorldstarHipHop in the morning, Bossip, Global Grind, and everything in between, but it's all so quick, I don't even think about it. And I've never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music.

Right now I'm taking a break from hip-hop documentaries. But I would do it if things lined up.

I'm a big hip-hop fan since being a kid. It was the first music that spoke to me and made me feel like, 'Yeah.'

I think Tupac was more someone who was trying to inform us about what was going on, and he did it through entertainment.

Hip Hop is an extension of our very being, and so the study of Hip Hop is the study of self-expression leading to the study of one's true self.

The Temple of Hip-Hop makes sure that we don't just approach hip-hop just through music or through rap. We approach the totality of hip-hop.

More people should rap about reality.

Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar sounds decades older than he is, and it's not necessarily the wear and tear that comes from a rough life; instead, his world-weariness seems to result from years of soul-searching.

I got a liberal education. A white guy, rapping as Bugs Bunny, on a quintuple-platinum album.

I'm a fan of hip hop music, so I always used a hip hop element in my music anyway.

People need to understand that hip-hop that has gun talk is just for entertainment; similar to if you were watching a movie.

There is still consciousness in hip hop.

The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.

A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

Hip-hop has been the guiding light of my life as a musician and a music fan. It's the one common thread through all of it from the time I bought my first record probably. It's always been there.

The rap game has to save itself. Everybody's saving it. People like Lil Wayne is saving it. He's bringing energy to it.

I liked hip-hop, wanted to do rap, and wanted to stand on a large stage. If you look at it in another angle... it's something that I chose.

I'm a little more mature, and a little more aware of the things that I might say. But um, it aint going nowhere because everyone still loves sex, but it's how you present it like I have this one track of Choice," which is a metaphor.

I always knew that I had to direct. That was something I'd wanted to do. Finally, I was just looking at the situation and I said, "I wanna document hip-hop, as an art form, seeing how a lot of people don't take it seriously."

I put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it