Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All rappers predominantly sound the same and want you to think their meanest person in the world, and that they're all gangster and all that. My acting allowed me to be playful and crazy, and it helps me tell stories and all that. I think it's a good time; rap needs that kind of stuff.
Me and my brother, Illa Noyz. We was smoking weed. A ton of weed. I had a friend who at the time sold weed, and it was just there. And we just smoke and smoke. I think we had about... and remember, this is back in the day, this might have been when niggas were still smoking White Owls.
What people don't understand is joining a gang ain't bad, it's cool, it's fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it's cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family's in the gang. We're not just killing people every night, we're just hanging out, having a good time.
I felt that I'm a real important part when it comes to hip-hop, but maybe not so much in the industry, so I felt that I was better of in an independent situation... where I have some control over my life and there's no middle man and it's basically me and my team handling my situation.
I find my dress sense tends to be a bit of a mixture between high fashion and unique vintage pieces with a little bit of street trends. For example, I might find a really nice, suede dinner jacket that I'd wear with a basic plain white shirt and some chinos and a pair of Nike trainers.
As long as you know yourself and you got good people around you and you passionate about what you do, that's all that matters because at the end of the day, you go to sleep with the people you love, you wake up with the people you love, and you spend your time with the people you love.
All my friends were black and Mexican. I was the only white kid in our group and had to work hard to be accepted. Year after year, we'd breakdance and we all became close and they labeled me "Vanilla" - like "Hey, Vanilla" and they knew I hated it, so of course they kept calling me it.
You download it for free, we get charged back for it. I know you're saying, "They won't know, they won't miss it, Besides, I ain't a thief, they won't pay me a visit." So, if I come to your job, take your corn on the cob, And take a couple kernels off it, that would be alright with you?
Bass! How low can you go? Death row...what a brother know. Once again, back is the incredible, The rhyme animal, the uncannable "D!" Public Enemy Number One. Five-O said, "Freeze!" and I got numb. Can I tell 'em that I really never had a gun? But it's the wax that the Terminator X spun.
I'm giving my fans the songs that they want to hear from me. Why do we love to hear ourselves being downgraded. Why do we love to hear the negative situations that we see in our lives daily? I'm not trying to make sense of it, I'm not giving any solutions, I'm just tossing the question.
I don't like pre-written raps; I think it makes the song better if you listen to the beat first. In a sense, you have to make a marriage with the beat. I ride the beat, hear the flow of the drums, get the melody of my flow, and then from that point, it's a process of what I want to say.
I felt like for what I needed, Bad Boy got me... they got me covered. Especially Puff, man. He's going to be the first billionaire rap entertainer. At the end of the day, they need me. Other artists-labels don't need me, but Bad Boy and Puff needs me. And I need them. It goes both ways.
When I am doing music, I sometimes become over compulsive to 'always make some new music'. I think I am like this because I sense what others are perceiving me as. If I work extraordinarily hard because of these expectations, I will, but I just cannot produce the good music that I want.
I had given thought to acting, but I never really had a good enough opportunity or a character who made sense and paralleled my life a little bit. I feel like I'm one of the poster boys for a bad guy in a movie. I feel like I'm a good person to play a bad guy in a movie. I can say that.
Redemption means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong. So I think a lot of people get hooked on drugs and when they get over that addiction they go out and they try to talk to kids and they try to work in rehab centers.
I spend a lot of time out there. I've got a lot of family that lives in Inglewood and surrounding areas. So I'm right in the hood, every time I go there I go see my peoples. I rep real hard for the people that I see that are the counterparts of what I'm trying to do out here, out there.
My mother is home. Your mother is your home. Everybody is a momma's boy or a momma's girl. That's where we came from, from a woman's womb. She always gave me good advice because mothers know best at times. She gives me advice and I take it, run with it and share that with somebody else.
All the big revolutions, whether it's the Industrial Revolution, the Arab Spring, those changes happened by economic and social shifts brought about by the people's voices, and those things weren't voted for. Most of our changes today are brought about through technology, not by voting.
The real reason Jews don't have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' 'Silver Bells' and 'The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)' were all written by Jews.
New York has changed a whole lot. For worse I think because back when I was growing up in New York we were always the trendsetters. I don't care if it was from clothes to hip-hop music, to whatever. Right now New York is a bunch of followers. A lot of them are. It's really not the same.
I feel think the next logical step is acting, which I think is cool but I never got the acting bug. I never looked at a movie and thought "I wanna act," but after seeing that play I thought, "I wanna write a movie, and I wanna write a play." I will write a movie and I will write a play.
To me, the Seventies were very inspirational and very influential... With my whole persona as Snoop Dogg, as a person, as a rapper. I just love the Seventies style, the way all the players dressed nice, you know, kept their hair looking good, drove sharp cars and they talked real slick.
My musical influence is really from my father. He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.
It's like if you plant something in the concrete and if it grow and the rose petal got all kinds of scratches and marks, you ain't gonna say, 'Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from the concrete.' You're gonna be like, 'Damn, a rose grew from the concrete?'
New York was at the forefront of rap, so because of all the great people who have gone before me, being a rapper from Queens, I have to live up to those standards. I'm basically just a regular guy who says what he feels and likes to joke. I like long walks on the beach... and I love rap.
I have done a lot of short dramas that are three, four or five episodes and so that makes the filming process similar to the independent film process; it is very intimate, and it is a small cast and a small crew and everyone is there with a common goal and want the best for that project.
The truth doesn't change. It was the same when Moses got the Ten Commandments as it is today. That's the thing about the truth. That's the thing about real. It doesn't change and it doesn't have to change. Now you can put it in a different book, but it's still real. It's still the truth.
There's only so much you can do on a physical level trying to tour or pass out mixtapes. Although that matters, I realized that you can reach more people putting your music on Soundcloud and networking with blogs to write about you. It really comes back to the music and what you release.
Only one girl has ever really wrapped my stomach into pretzels. She didn’t give me butterflies. She gave me pterodactyls I’m talking terrible internal bruising and the first time I kissed her was like the first time I saw fireworks, which was like the sky first kissing me in the eyeballs
You can't just sing the song and live another life, you know. It's really difficult now because that's not what it's about. It's pop and pop just says that we could be actors. We could sing about stuff and not believe in it. It could be absolutely fraudulent and it doesn't really matter.
All my life, men have told me I wasn't pretty enough - even the men I was dating. And I'd be like, 'Well, why are you with me, then?' It's always been men putting me down just like my dad. To this day when someone says I'm cute, I can't see it. I don't see it no matter what anybody says.
I want to be someone who is respected and not just in terms of my music. I want to be respected in terms of the way that I treat people... Music is my creative outlet in terms of expressing what is important to me; what has importance, what has a value. And I wanna be respected for that.
I grew up listening and looking up at these people and laughing at Carol Burnett and singing James Taylor songs. And same with Smokey Robinson. So they were such a huge influence as a child that to actually sit alongside them and perform on the same bill was an amazing experience for me.
I got the opportunity to meet people all over the world. Brilliant women, tall women, short women, slim women, thick women, you name it. But, I don't meet them. I have the opportunities to and it's a little bit - I'm a little shy, so I don't meet them and I don't know who's right for me.
I got an album concept called 'Exit Strategy,' that might be one of my last ones. It's a term they use in business when you build companies. You create an exit strategy as you make a company. You don't wait till you're five years in it; you create a exit strategy as you make the company.
I didn't really know what to expect, but I thought there aren't a lot of rap groups that can say they have a documentary done about them, so my attitude was like, 'Shoot, why not?' I'm sure there are a lot of people that would like to take our place. I felt like we should all embrace it.
We have all these politicians that claim they're pro-life and that say women should not be able to get abortions and all this other stuff... there's nothing more pro-life than helping a woman who wants to have a child have a child. Then I realized that health insurance doesn't cover IVF.
I think my first hit was probably '24 is a Rubberband Man,' which was my second album. My first project, it was very well received in the Southeast region, all throughout the South and parts of the Midwest. It was very well received, but I didn't get national exposure on my second album.
It doesn't get any more underground, conscious or indie than Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, but because they got a couple of really big pop hits, actually some of the biggest pop hits that hip-hop has ever seen, people are missing that part of their story. People are not counting that blessing.
My personal take on politics is I deal with social situations and cultural situations in my music and in my life. I have said on record many times that I haven't voted. I'm not the type of person who says, 'I'm never going to vote.' I think it's clear to me that our system has failed us.
When I say ' thug' I mean not a criminal, someone who beats you over the head, I mean the underdog. You could have two people- one person has everything he needs to succeed and one person has nothing. If the person who has nothing succeeds, he's a thug. Cuz he overcame all the obstacles.
I wanted to appeal to people who've never really listened to hip-hop or really given it a chance before. I've also tried to incorporate all my favorite lifestyle things in the music. Of course, 'Fashion Killa' is one of peoples' favorites because it just expresses how much I like fashion.
I don't take for granted all the blessings that I have, and as soon as I heard about Computers for Youth, I really wanted to be involved. Anyone who knows me knows how much time I spend on computers. I'm a computer addict. Every young person deserves to have a computer in his or her home.
When I played football, basketball and baseball, I was always a starter. I played baseball as the number three or number four hitter. Playing baseball, I was the third baseman or pitcher. Football, I was the quarterback. I was always versatile. It came to me naturally. It was always easy.
I didn't start off with the responsibility because I didn't think anybody would care. But as you do meet these people influenced by your music, then you start to understand you have a responsibility. I don't think you initially know it until you feel the power of what you're really doing.
I believe in God and not religion, because I believe religion is the double cross. Because I've been double crossed by three religions, so I think I can safely say that religion - there is maybe something wrong with religion. Every temple that's put up may not be a holy one, so watch out.
Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all. You don't have that fear. So why do you think people get stuck in those boxes? It's that fear of going back down.
When I first started, everything happened at once. I became religious, my musical career took off, I got married, I had kids, and all that happened within the course of a year. I had an excitement about this newly found faith, and so I was writing about that in a very evident kind of way.
We knew we'd be together, we didn't know when, But long distance love, never thought it would end. The feelings never changed until the call came... You were engaged, I was in pain. It was such a shame: the timing, it just wasn't right. So I say, 'Good luck,' and then I say, 'Good night.'
I've been doing morning pages: the first thing I do when I wake up is sit down and write three pages of whatever comes into my head. The more I do them, the more creative I get and the smaller my problems seem. I can turn something that I hated a few days ago into a short story or a song.