"I listen to hip-hop for the beat. I don't listen to it for the lyrics anymore. Really, what am I gonna get out of it besides the beat? How many times you gonna say, 'I'm trying to catch a ride' and 'dirty' in one song. What I dug and still dig about hip-hop is its ability to be authentic and brazen. I think the bitches and hoes thing probably went too far as a communicating how we talk in the hood.. It's kinda sad that the realest rapper, so to speak, is probably still Eminem. There's an imbalance; too much candy hip-hop. Every once in a while give me a little bit of something to think about." - Carlos Mencia, XXL October 2006
"Let's be real, music has lost a lot of its soul. When you look at VH1 and see how people were puttin' it down in the late '60s, '70s, even in the '80s, you get envious as an artist from today. Shit, they had acid! They had cocaine on the mixin' board! They had hippies! They had world tours with each other. They had Woodstock. You know what I'm sayin'? They had sex drugs and rock 'n roll! But today you have an industry [hip-hop] that should represent no fear, being scared to death, and that's why I took some musical chances.. I didn't put nuthin' to be number one, sell millions.. I've done that. Now, I wanna inspire." - P. "Puff Daddy" Diddy, Nylon guys, Fall 2006
"What's rich, really? I hang out with rich people and they don't think that they're rich enough. I'm rich with God, I'm rich with my kids, and I'm rich with my work and that's way more powerful." - Lee Daniels, June 2006
"If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are."
- Charles-Louis de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
"One of the problems that came with New York is that everybody is fightin' to be the most talked about - the King of NY, the biggest crew in NY, the baddest crew in NY - and it's come to a point where people stop being competitive in hip-hop. You need to make music and you need to say, 'You know what? Let me look at who's at the top five on the charts right now.' Me, I'm gonna do my groundwork to make sure I'm OK in the streets and I'm OK in the charts. I'm not gonna make a song about my block when my block holds 100 people. You gotta make songs that are universal." - Fabolous, YRB, Issue# 65
"When I go to the record store and see myself in the R&B section between legitimate R&B artists like Usher and R. Kelly, I pick my stuff out and put it in the pop section. It's very frustrating because I don't think I sound like either one of them and I don't think it's doing a service to them or to me. If you want to classify the music then listen to the album first." - Van Hunt, Touch, August 2006
"My grandfather was in Vietnam, he had an ethnic platoon - poor blacks, Latinos - and he was surrounded by Vietnamese and he thought they were going to fire on him. But one of them came out and said, 'black man go home, this is not your war'. That's a true story, they let him go. When my grandfather thought about his life was spared by his alleged enemy, he got to thinking about why he was there, why he was fighting, so from then on he named all his children after revolutionary figures. I believe there's a lot in a name, sometimes it's all you have." - Rhymefest, Touch, August 2006
I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it." - Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know
"Life is a tragedy for those who feel....and a comedy for those who think." - (shaken in by Warbux)
"I probably had the most experience on the Get Rich or Die Tryin film set, so I gave 50 a lot of advice. We got to know each other very well. We had some long talks.. You've got to look at 50. He's up at seven in the morning, studio, interviews, filming, he don't drink, don't smoke, he's totally focused. After filming, I'd be like 'You coming out?', and he'd go 'nah man, and go straight to bed! I respected him for that." - Ashley Waters, Touch, August 20067
"When 50 Got Mobb Deep tatted on his arm, we went and got G-Unit written on ours. That is a loyalty thing to us. It shows that nobody is playing around." - Prodigy, Rime, Issue #18
"I tell people I'm retired. I kinda like this Jay-Z thing, where he's retired, but he keeps doing shows. I think I beat him to that. If you say you're retired, people don't bother you so much."
- Bill Murray, Starpulse, August 17, 2006
"All I want to articulate to people is I'm not who you think I am. I know that sounds like some Britney Spears bullshit but when I go online and read some of the stuff my own fans think about me, it's like 'Wow, do they really have that narrow a view of what I do?' The hardest thing for people to grasp is that you can love something and move on with your life but not fall out of love with that thing. I'm not about what I was about 10 years ago." - DJ Shadow, URB, Jul/Aug 2006
"If everybody's driving the Range Rover on 26' rims and here come somebody in a Bentley coupe with the red leather interior and it's the only one, you stand out. It's like people are scared to stand out because they don't want to be criticized. They want to fit in. We don't want to fit in. We want to create." - Sa-Ra, Scratch, Sep/Oct 2006
"It's not about competing or comparing. It's about coexisting and establishing an alternative in listening, creating, thinking, and living. There's a time and place for everything. It's not a judgment or an insult to anybody doing what they do, 'cause in actuality, the fact that they do what they do defines me even more. We help each other out." - Cee-Lo, Vibe, September 2006
"I was born an original and I don't want to die a copy. - (shaken in by Giselle)
"There's no such thing as a sellout. The only thing that's a sellout if I say, 'I hate the color pink. Pink sucks, man. Pussies wear pink. Fuck pink. You would never see me in no fuckin pink. You could pay me a billion dollars and I'll never wear the pink.' Next day you see me I'm all in pink. I changed my name to MC Pink [laughs]. That's a sellout when you go against the shit you stood for." - will.i.am, Scratch, Sep/Oct 2006
"Fake is tha new trend, and everybody seems 2 be in style! - (shaken in by ~new-new~)
"No matter what they think about ya... long as they tune the fuck in." - Don King, Only In America (shaken in by Phila)
"What about all the skinny black girls? How you think they feel having the pressure to be thick? The girls in the video make it harder to be yourself when everybody walking across the screen with a stacked body with hips, ass, titties, and long indian weaves." - (shaken in by Jan Jan)
"I like smart girls. Smarts over looks, believe it or not. If you can't talk, what is it? It's just a fat ass with a voice. And that shit only has a 10 to 15 year stretch of excellence. After a while shit starts getting loose and it's just not the same anymore." - Pharrell, Giant, August/September 2006
"Smart is not a 4 letter word...that would be smar..." - (shaken in by just take it or leave it)
"I feel like I was blacklisted, but the Don't Be Cruel era is hard to forget. ' My Perogative' - that song got a lot of people through college. If they've seen Usher and thought they've seen great talent, they ain't seen shit yet. I can do this with my eyes closed, I don't need no rehearsal." - Bobby Brown, King, September 2006
"In 96', I told Doug [E. Fresh], you know, underground is over. That shit is dead. This is the time when everybody was still in the zone of "What's real hip-hop?" It was that big rift between backpackers and the mainstream, gangster cats. I told Doug the reason underground hip-hop is dead is because I can listen to hip-hop 24 hours a day on a commercial radio station. The thrill in hip-hop, what kept hip-hop cool was, 'Damn, I got to go find this. Damn, who's playing this shit?' What kept Def Jam at its cutting edge was you had to go seek Def Jam out." - Hank Shocklee, Scratch, July/August 2006
"[The music industry] it's crazy stuff. I don't sleep. Do I ever want to quit? I dunno. This is my trade right now. I didn't finish high school." - Ghostface, Rime, Issue# 18
"When I was 12 years old, I was at JFK Airport in New York with my parents. The flight was delayed, so I went into a bookstore and got Spike Lee's book, where he talks about making She's Gotta Have It. And I thought, "Wow, this is legitimately something I can go do." So life goes on, I decide to go to film school, his film school [NYU]. I make movies, start a foundation, and the foundation gets involved with this community in India, to try and help save children's lives.
That means Spike Lee's saving lives. He was a link in a chain that he is completely unaware of, by empowering me, who then empowers other people. If somebody told Spike, "Yeah, you're going to make movies and stuff, but actually what's going to happen is you're going to save about ten children's lives in a town in India if you just write this book," he wouldn't believe it. But it's what happened, and it continues to happen, this veining of positive actions. I talk to Spike a lot, but I've never told him this story. He would probably think it was corny." - M. Night Shyamalan, Fandango, July 17, 2006
"Purpose is destiny known---Vision is destiny seen." - (shaken in by Bishop Eddie Long)
"Start by doing what's necessary, then do what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
- St Francis of Assisi
"Cry me a river and build a bridge to get over it." - Dorsey Levens, 2 Live Stews (ATL Sports talk radio), June 2006 (shaken in by B'Anca)
"If you aren't the lead dog, the view never changes... - (shaken in by Noyori)
"I think Nelly is probably the James Brown of this era. - Smokey Robinson, allhiphop.com, 7/21/06
