There was no hip-hop before Afrika Bambaataa.
Hip-hop artists, especially the older ones, are the ones who knew hip-hop was a worldwide phenomenon before the mainstream caught on, so hip-hop artists are forward thinkers. We want to stay with the new.
If you think about 2Pac, Biggie, and Nas, all of those guys were teenagers or in their early 20s when they got started. Everybody acts like young people have to be silly and lack perspective. Those guys had incredible perspective, and everything that they said was before 25 years old.
The Roots are well-respected and considered vanguards in the music.
To me, Wu-Tang is beyond Wu-Tang Clan... It's just like, hip-hop is beyond Grandmaster Flash, but Grandmaster Flash was one of the first guys to hit those turntables like that. The same thing with Wu-Tang. You'll see the difference in hip-hop from the moment we came in to before we came in. We changed it. We changed the whole structure.
I appreciate people who make hip-hop... the way A Tribe Called Quest and Lauryn Hill and KRS-One did it.
I've been listening to the old school hip-hop stuff and rock like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
I love to get on tracks with brothers like Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, the GZA. The whole crew is golden, man. When you think of us, you gotta say, 'Yo, these are the Jacksons of hip-hop.'
When my time is up in hip-hop, it's going to remain what Afrika Bambaataa thought it was supposed to be. It's going to remain what Kool Herc thought it was supposed to be; what Wu-Tang Clan sees it as; what Outkast sees it as; what Snoop Dogg sees it as. People are trying to forget that brand of hip-hop.
My favorite era of hip-hop was between '85-'89. That was the era that got me to love hip-hop.
Run DMC brought us out of that underground-only feel. They brought rap above ground and made it respectable as an art form to mainstream music.
I think people that came out originally, like 2Pac, Biggie, Snoop Dogg,, and even T.I. and Ludacris, they were original with their vibe, but at the same time, they were classics.
I was heavily influenced by Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, Grandmaster Caz, but I kind of wanted to take it somewhere else.
Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time. It was a time of heightened rightwing politics, so the climate dictated the direction of the group.
I had love for Breakout; I had love for Bambaataa. I had love for Kool Herc.
Award shows, like the Grammys, were tough on us early in hip-hop, not even televising our categories or splitting them up on best male or female or any of that. We had to earn them.
When we were making 'Juvenile Hell,' we were listening to the Jungle Brothers, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Biz Markie, A Tribe Called Quest.
So to compare the Beatles, obviously the Beatles are the Beatles, but in hip-hop terms, Tribe is the Beatles. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are the Beatles. Big Daddy Kane is Jimi Hendrix. It means that much to people that grew up with it.
Everyone uses grime as a footstool, but imagine Biggie Smalls started doing hip hop, and it started going well, and then he started making RnB: there would be no hip hop!
Somewhere down the line, the evil ones stole the legacy of hip hop and flipped it to a corporate type of hip hop. They decided to tell everybody 'Well, this is what hip hop is,' instead of coming back to the pioneers and getting the true definition of what hip hop is and what it was and what we been pushing for all these years.
