Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love Trader Joe's.
I mean, I'm no superhero.
I do not seem like a funny guy.
For me, I'm a super private person.
'Rise Up' is very necessary. Point blank.
I think we could really play the Olympics.
I've always sort of listened to news radio.
Life is just a moment of time and it pass by
If there's a heaven, I can't find the stairway
I chop 'em into salad and my name ain't Caesar.
A lot of our earlier material was freestyle tunes.
Everything I do has been a lifetime in the making.
I was married to a state of mind and I divorced it
I grew up in the neighborhood where 'Rocky' came from.
I definitely enjoy performing on stage with The Roots.
For me, the arts has always been sort of my saving grace.
I'm not driven by the spotlight and I'm not that outgoing.
I strive for improvement. want to be a master of my craft.
The Roots want to dip our toes into everything in the arts.
The Roots brand is like the Lipton of hip-hop, so to speak.
Just think: what if you could just, just blink yourself away?
The first rhymes I wrote, I was 9. It was Kool Moe Dee-style.
I like to say hip-hop was born when I was in my mother's womb.
I'm tryin' to get some acting credibility, get some other work.
The Roots are well-respected and considered vanguards in the music.
We've always been a band that intentionally transcended race and age.
I'm down to work with anyone as long as it's an organic collaboration.
We usually overrecord. Then we boil it down to the cream of the cream.
Don't do anything for fear, because fear will never do anything for you.
When people see that we're signed to Def Jam, the perception has changed.
The Roots - we signed our first record deal when I was about 19 years old.
By the time I was, you know, 16 years old, I had done a lot of growing up.
We're trying to plug a void and bring what's been missing back to hip-hop.
If hip-hop is dead, then let it rest in peace and let's move on to something else.
In a lot of places Jay-Z is considered God, Philly, our hometown being one of them.
I got a family to take care of and kids to feed. That's my motivation, this is my job.
I started as a visual artist and I've always dealt with music in that same sort of way.
I grew up in Mount Airy, a middle-class enclave in the Northwestern area of Philadelphia.
Questlove and I - we were in high school with artists like Boyz II Men and Amel Larrieux.
The most profound memory I have from my childhood is burning down my house at 6 years old.
I move in silence. I don't like puttin' too much of me out there to be dissected, analyzed.
The principles of true hip-hop have been forsaken, It's all contractual and about money makin'.
You can always hear me breathing during my verses, but that breathing becomes part of the music.
I think we need more community health programs and we need to develop programs that are low-cost.
I think poor folks are the only people who cannot afford - financially and otherwise - to be sick.
What we were doing was alien in '92. We were less than immediately accepted by our fans and peers.
The thing that's carried over from my visual-art education into what I do musically is my openness.
We've been branded 'the thinking man's hip-hop.' So the music's got to have some level of maturity.
The difference between a Black Thought album and a Roots album is the texture, the instrumentation.
And the blunts and liquor killing our lungs and liver. The asthmatic drug-addict, I function with it