Gza Quotes

It's definitely been a long, long... long, long, long, long, long journey since I was selling burnt CD's out of my backpack in downtown Oakland.

I never was a person that said, 'I'm gonna be a rapper.' I thought I would be a doctor. I just knew how to rap, and it was a cool thing to do, so I started doing it for fun.

Ultimately, I really like to rap, and seeing what I can do to keep it fresh for myself has lent itself to tailoring over time.

The competitive nature of hip-hop culture has always had battling involved with it. So you battle with the other artist but not necessarily in business and everywhere else.

What a lot of people don't know is that Wyclef started off as a battle rapper, when he decided that he would rhyme.

Underground hip-hop is, like, one of my foundations, I would say a cornerstone of my foundation of my musical tastes.

think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.

I have gone through many difference phases in my love affair with hip-hop.It evolves, your taste. It sometimes deepens, in terms of what's out; sometimes it's not as deep in terms of what's out. So it's definitely an evolution. I don't ever claim to be a hip-hop head.

I never wanted to do the mixtape circuit and 300,000 people hear it and that's a chapter of my life and when I do another album I'm coming off of that chapter but the whole world didn't hear that chapter so it's like I would have to start over.

Exciting underground stuff is easier to find with YouTube than it used to be. You don't have to go to the dive bar in the bad part of town to see a band you would never usually see. My personal experience with it, when I was looking for a new lead guitarist, I was able to stalk guitarists on Youtube. And instead of having a horribly embarrassing auditioning process, I could check out peoples' playing. In some ways, you go into a record shop and the selection is narrower than it used to be with pop ruling the roost, but if you look, there's so much more to be found.

When bands come from that underground scene and go into the mainstream, people just hate it. And it blows my mind. If you're saying you don't like what pop culture is, then change it. And when someone does make an effort to change it, everyone rebels against it and hates it. You can't win. People just want that division to exist. They don't want that division to go away.

I'm also working on another independent film called Roxanne, Roxanne, about Roxanne Shante, who was one of the first African American battle rappers from Brooklyn. It is produced by Forest Whitaker and Pharrell [williams], so I'm really in great hands.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.

Hip-hop is a competition culture. It's based around, "My DJ is better than you. My graffiti artist is better than you."

It's hard being a white rapper sometimes! When that happens you just need to battle through.

I can't stand rap....people who can't sing do rap....you can sing rebellion as well as talk it....Hitler would have been in a rap band.

There's always going to be space for battle in hip hop. For competition. It's just an inseparable part of the game.

Mixtape legend, underground kings... Looking for the right way to do the wrong things

Rap and dance is pretty much what I want to be known for.

You can never go back to the first two albums in a career.

I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger.

I never set out to make men a career; it just happened that way.

And it's a little - very humbling to think that running for president of the United States is - for a kid from Brooklyn, it's quite a step.

I started out to be a person on the street, just like everybody else. I didn't start out to be a singer. But I got sort of swept up in this singing thing, and after I got involved in it it got really important to me if I was good or not.