Street Music Quotes

I was listening to Young Jeezy and Shawty Red, and to me, the trap music they had was something special.

It's great to bring urban music to the commercial scene.

Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat.

I really got deep into downloading music when I moved to the South and got a computer. So I was downloading the The Diplomats, AZ, Half-A-Mil, 40 Cal.

You'll be fooled if you only get your hip-hop from the mainstream, you know. The things that move people are not just found in the mainstream cultures. And when we talk about hip-hop in general, hip-hop's basically preoccupied with life.

When I do a song, it is more or less for the radio because I've got to do it - that's what I have got to do to win - I always go home and write two street songs.

When I decided to collaborate with people, I wanted to collaborate more with the underdogs, the street people, messing with the people like Jae Millz and Papoose. When I went to New York, they were all over the mixtapes, so I wanted to get down with those guys instead of trying to go safe with all the super-big names.

We grew up listening to music like that: we grew up on the snap music, grew up off the trap music, grew up on all the South sound.

I came up in Brooklyn singing doo-wop music from the time I was 13 to the time I was 20. That music served a purpose of keeping a lot of people out of trouble, and also it was a passport from one neighborhood to another.

I was born and raised in the Bronx, and growing up here, you would go down the block, and on one corner you would hear bachata, on another corner some salsa, and of course there was hip-hop and R&B all over the place. So for me, it is very organic to have these combinations.

The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there'd be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.

I always loved the way music made me feel. I did sports at school and all, but when I got home, it was just music. Everybody in my neighborhood loved music. I could jump the back fence and be in the park where there were ghetto blasters everywhere.

I'd get a train to some town and wander about to find a decent spot. Sometimes I'd play for three hours; sometimes I'd get moved on after three songs.

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

It's just rock and roll. A lot of times we get criticized for it. A lot of music papers come out with: 'When are they going to stop playing these three chords?' If you believe you shouldn't play just three chords it's pretty silly on their part. To us, the simpler a song is, the better, 'cause it's more in line with what the person on the street is.

I sang do-wop on the street corner before it was called do-wop.

A mixtape is for the street, it's something you without necessarily thinking about it, because you have to stay in the game. It's like writing an e-mail saying hello to your friends.

I'm obsessed - not just interested, obsessed - with folk music, street music, the parallels between a country's street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have travelled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me. Have you heard any trance music? That's the thing.

My core thing is gangster rap, but a lot of my music is melodic and carries a message of survival.

Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the sounds I was creating.

When we came out, they just labelled us 'ratchet music' cos we said 'ratchet' a lot. Ratchet means that's it's ghetto, but I would just call the music we're making just good music.

Starting in my teens, I was always standing on the corner near our apartment singing harmony with friends. We'd also go to the park and sing under the bridge near the lake for the echo. When it was cold out, we'd stand in the little heated lobby in the project's administration building, where my mom paid the rent each month.

My da used to sing 'Take Her Up to Monto' to me when we were walking down the street - he still does, actually - because it's got a walking tempo, and I still sing it to myself when I'm walking along.

When I first heard rap, I wasn't quick to be critical. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I had a feeling it was a reflection of what's been happening in the ghetto.