Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.
I listened to a lot of old school, golden era music. It gave me a lot of insight on how to rap and give my all.
I break an emcee off proper Yo don't check me, Ask your Moms and Pops, Yo they respect me, But here you stand, tryin' to get yours, but gettin' nothin' You probably can't spell "Boogie Down" or "Productions"
People know, lyrically, I go in, and you should never take me lightly on any record.
To be honest with you, I don't have one track that I consider better than the next because all I'm trying to do is still grow as an artist. I got way better since the early nineties, as far as putting words together. My best energy probably was the '90s, because I was new.
Take 7 emcees put em in a line And add 7 more brothers who think they can rhyme It'll take 7 more before I go for mine And that's 21 emcees ate up at the same time.
We all knew how talented K.Dot is. We knew how dope he was lyrically.
If you want to relate me to the newer cats, let's go. Let's go line for line and bar for bar. If it's all about spitting and metaphors and MCing and lyrics and entendres, I will eat 99 percent of you dudes up.
I'm never doing a new album. I'll probably do nothing but singles. I'm as good as anybody out there lyrically and conceptually and can go toe to toe with the best of them throughout history. But I don't know how much longer I'll be doing it. It's not really fun anymore.
Half the rhymes you write, you're saying that you're better than the other MC. That's how we keep the craft sharp.
When I leave I always come right back here. The young spitter that everybody in rap fear.
I said Yo Jay, I can rap. And I spit this rap that said I'm killin' ya'll *****s on this lyrical sh*t, mayonnaise colored benz, I push miracle whips.
I don't really listen to rap; I just like to rap.
Not anyone can rap to my beats.
Big Sean could get on a verse with anybody and probably annihilate them.
Too many MC's take that word 'emcee' lightly; They can't Move a Crowd, not even slightly.
I've been on the songs of all these rappers that put out an album, and my music is still better.
But I still rap like I'm on my Pharoahe Monch grind.
When I first got to Nashville, somebody said that [Kris Kristofferson and I] were the only two people who could describe Dolly Parton without using their hands.
I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.
My raps be crazy, and my hooks are nasty.
Eminem. My son was listening to that and I was like, “What is that junk?” Then I started listening and I thought, You know, that kid is pretty good. It's the storytelling.
I feel like there's a lot of rappers that could out-rap me and I wouldn't want to face any of them.
I probably spent more time listening to albums than writing songs. But I think that gave me all the tricks in terms of wordplay, from how I pronounced my words to the actual delivery.
My skills are musical, not lyrical.
