Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used to be the class clown. I was the funny kid. That's why it was so hard for people to understand that I rap, because for a long time, they didn't take me seriously for who I was. By, like, eighth grade, I was really rapping.
I'm just trying to be an example for all the young artists that are becoming artists every day and working on their craft and trying to help them avoid the pitfalls of the upper management in music and the non-music side of music.
I think there's a lot of taboos in hip-hop that people try and stay away from. I think a big one is, people are afraid to speak about God to a certain extent, and I think if you're not free to speak about God, then you're not free.
I think our duty as American citizens is to be involved and engaged in anything that affects us. As an artist, I have to use my platform, and as a dad, a brother, and a black man, I have to be as socially woke and present as possible.
With 'Acid Rap,' I allowed myself to be really open-minded and free with who I allowed into my musical space. I wanted to make a cohesive product, but I also just want to make a bunch of dope songs inspired by whatever sounds I liked.
When you're a Chicago artist, to play Lollapalooza, that's not a normal thing. It's artists on a path to a certain place that do that. Chief Keef did it; Kids These Days did it; Cool Kids did it. And I'm the next Cool-Kids-Chief, if you will.
When I was going out and trying to fully give glory to God, in my setting, I feared that people would be dismissive of it, like, 'This is Christian rap. I'm not trying to hear it.' But it's the total opposite: People were very accepting of it.
I think the only thing that's really going to make a change in terms of how we feel as citizens in terms of safety and our relationship with the police is if we start seeing more federal indictments, arrests, and convictions of police officers.
Every song on '10 Day' is a completely different sound - the cadence, the flow, even the production - because I like so many different types of music and because my taste is so refined. 'Acid Rap' is another tape where every song sounds different.
It wasn't until I left that I realised it's not weird to grow up in certain cities and, by the age of 27 or 28, for all of your friends to still be alive. I can think of a lot of kids that I knew in Chicago who were supposed to grow up but didn't.
You can love somebody through anything when they're your child, and now that I understand that, it makes me work better with people; it makes me more understanding of how much dedication and love I can put into each line. There's no throwaway lines.
We've been conditioned to understand music as a field where you get discovered, and you're always trying to find that end. So 'my shot' is speaking of a variety of shots. When you're a rapper, you look at every shot as the one you're supposed to take.
I remember sitting on the back of the bus on the first day of the Social Experiment tour with my face in my hands. I emptied out my bank account, and before I did that tour, that was the number one thing I said I'd never do. I'll never empty out my savings.
There's a hunger in me that always wants to be creating and orating, telling people something and giving them information and getting feedback. There are so many questions that I'm trying to ask, and I'm still so far from being done saying what I gotta say.
The idea of 'talking white,' a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it's not black and that it's actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.
Being in the space that I am as a writer, and just as a black dude in America, there's this push to be cool or be what you're expected to be. There's a need for a song that puts that in perspective. I think that's an important thing for young children to hear growing up.
There's so much positivity in the world and your day-to-day life that to go as far as to say that you hate something or you wish it didn't exist and all the bad things in the world happen to you and only you, it's a joke. It's not real to have that much hate in your heart.
I had already been making music for my whole high school life, and '10 Day,' which took me a whole year to finish, was about working with a lot of different producers and learning all of the aspects about being a rapper, from shows to recording to studio etiquette to marketing.
People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!
I don't know where people think I'm from, but I'm from Chicago. It's really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, 'There's two sides to it, and it's a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.' But it's really just a very scummy place where people don't have respect for other people's lives.
The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?
The whole tape [Dedication 5] is amazing. It's my favourite accomplishment [working with Lil Wayne] and I say that with thought. It's the biggest accomplishment I've made today, because Lil Wayne is probably the biggest reason why I'm sitting here right now, rapping and doing what I do. I'm a huge Wayne fan forever.
One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.
One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.'
I used to always rock a cap when I was in high school and get them taken away. It was an excessive amount. Like, so often that, at the end of each school year, there would be a box of all the confiscated caps. After they gave back a few caps to other kids, they would just give me the box because the rest were all my hats.
It's important to go against the grain. My favorite celebrity, across arts and sports and everything, is Muhammad Ali. And he was famous for speaking inflammatory things that were polarizing but also were important to building who he was as a man and his legacy. And in the end, he was right about most of the s... he was talkin' about.
The weird thing about rap is that you don't get compared in the same way that athletes do, even though it's probably the most competitive sport in music. In basketball, they look at a player and say: 'This guy was the best in his prime at this sport.' But in rap it's not until you're dead or retired that people think about it like that.