Hip-Hop Origins Quotes

Hip-hop was fast, originally. It was always fast music.

I would have to be traditional and say that my favorite era of hip-hop was between '85-'89. That was the era that got me to love hip-hop.

A lot of people forget that R&B put hip-hop on, R&B put rock on.

The original version of 'Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang' was made to a Boz Scaggs song; I can't remember the name of the song.

My dad is from Queens. I remember visiting as a kid. My grandparents grew up here. All the actors I respected were coming out of here. All the hip-hop I was listening to - Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, Biggie, Wu Tang - was coming out of New York. I'm just into it.

In 1977, hip-hop literally wasn't outside the boroughs. But I was profoundly aware of the city through films like Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, and Network. I had a friend who visited New York, and I asked him what it was like. He said, "Oh, it's great. Just wear a coat and don't look anyone in the eye."

You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it's like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.

The thing about hip-hop is that it's from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.

By no means am I excusing homophobic rap lyrics, but as a product of the same environments that birthed hip-hop, I fully understand why those lyrics existed.

If you hear people talking about the Golden Era of rap, they're usually talking about the early Wu Tang Clan era and then Nas and Biggie and so on. But for me, it goes back to the '80s - 1986 to 1989.

Although I grew up as a fan of the culture from the disco D.J. era as a young kid and hearing the beginnings of hip-hop, I'm hearing it all from another borough in Brooklyn.

Whether looking at pop music, hip-hop or R&B, it's rare to find an artist who hasn't been touched or affected by the power and soul of gospel music. In fact, many of today's popular artists such as Whitney Houston, John Legend, and Katy Perry started their careers in the church choir.

As far as hip hop, I ain't even gonna front, it was 'Rapper's Delight.' That was the first thing I heard where I was like, 'Whoa.' You take that beat and do something over it. I started collecting records after that, old records.

So you think that hip-hop had it's start out in Queensbridge, If you popped that junk up in the Bronx you might not live.

Back in the day, rappers were 'bump bump bump ba bump ba bump.' They was rhyming like that, but I was like, 'bababa bump bump babum ba babump bababa bump.'

I had a few DJs in my neighbourhood that would play music in the streets. There was no hip-hop yet; there were just DJs that were playing disco, funk, and pop music, and we would gather round, go to the parks, and dance and enjoy ourselves.

When 'G' Thang' was created, I was living in Agoura Hills, and Snoop and Warren G were living with me.

My entryway into hip-hop was - my biggest introduction was obviously like, you know, the Def Jam, Run D.M.C., Beastie Boys, like, that conglomerate.

The whole history of music has turned out to be something perfect. It's all come around. The music we did with Funkadelic and Parliament was the DNA for hip-hop.

There is rap music in all my films. In 'La Vie des Morts,' there is rap music too. It's because I'm French, and when it appeared in 1978, it was so new, it set off my musical imagination.

I was a huge fan of '90s hip-hop, and a lot of what they got their music from was funk and soul records. They just, like, take a clip of that and rap over it because, you know, that was just kind of what was up.

Scandinavian rap started in the '90s, off the back of Run DMC, and it was a bunch of Swedish dudes doing the same thing.

I've always felt that because I'm from Cleveland, which isn't recognised as a place for hip-hop, I needed to step it up if I wanted to make myself known.

In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.