Hip Hop Identity Quotes

I feel like your city - with hip hop in particular, because we're always beating our chest and shouting where we're from - your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York - KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.

I see myself as a hip-hop artist, but I never wanted to make music for a specifically white audience. That's not what I grew up around.

Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.

I come from a traditional hip-hop background.

I may be Jewish, but my religion is hip-hop.

I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of our black people culture, and it's the name of our identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls. To me, that's the biggest problem.

If you take 'Nothin' But a G Thang' by Dr Dre, that could also be an R&B record. 'Bonita Applebum' by A Tribe Called Quest could even be a jazz record. 'Bring Da Ruckus,' you gotta call it hip-hop.

Everyone who raps isn't hip-hop. To be hip-hop, you've got to know the culture. You got to know the history.

I always viewed myself as kind of hip-hop's outcast, or hip-hop's stepson.

There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, “yes,” in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.

Hip hop - it's an art form but it's a culture as well. You grow up in the culture and you never leave it. It's a style of dress; it's a way of thought. I always grew up in the culture, and it was part of who I was and I carried it into every world I was in.

I felt like I related to East Coast lyricism a little more. Because I couldn't be super gangsta.

You are not doing hip hop; you ARE hip hop.

I don't ever claim to be a hip-hop head.

I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of the culture, and it's the name of the identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls.

To be hip-hop is much more than just rapping in the production. It is more in the attitude.

Hip-hoppers are not interpreting what hip-hop is, and when we do interpret it, we interpret it as something immature, unorganized, and outlaw.

I honestly now know that I'm the physical embodiment of hip-hop on earth. That's my only purpose here on earth is to keep the culture together long enough for it to remain everything that we thought it could be when I was coming up.

I don't like to be considered a 'hip-hop mogul.' I don't know what that means.

Chicago's known for the drill. Keefs, Lil Durks, and whatnot. My music, on the other hand, it has a message to it. I think that's what sets me apart. I think it gets deeper than saying anything on a trap beat. I'm putting stories together, and people are relating to what I am saying.

Record companies feel they are the culture. Hip-hop has to begin to define, protect, and promote itself, and that's why we founded the Temple.

That's a win for me, for people to be able to say, 'Faith, fatherhood, monogamy exists in hip-hop.'

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.

Hip-hop is my girlfriend, hip-hop is my kid. Hip-Hop fills the void of the things that I don't have. I pay it 101% attention. I don't think I could be as good a father, or as good a husband or anything like that - the way I am as an artist - until I'm not an artist anymore.

For us to keep claiming this isn't Hip Hop and that isn't Hip Hop doesn't make sense to me.