I had to have tests for cancer and other diseases - it wasn't much fun. I was getting a shooting pain in my hip and we didn't know what it was. First of all we thought it was an old injury. But they didn't find anything wrong, even though when I had an ultrasound test it was all really swollen.

Hip hop classes and ballet are what I've been keeping up with, and of course my usual abdominal workout, which consists of 500 sit-ups a session. Or I take a 30-minute abs class at my gym. But dance classes are a full-body cardio workout, which always brings me success and keeps me feeling great.

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.

'Scream Queens' was so much fun, kind of like a big sorority. And 'American Horror Story' is very serious, like a really hip family of middle-aged women. The deaths were fun on 'Scream Queens'; the deaths on 'Horror Story' are very real and intense, and you have to be emotionally prepped for them.

If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.

I practice yoga at home to a TV show called 'Inhale,' taught by Steve Ross. I figured that if the people on the show could stretch that deep then I could too. I ended up pulling my hip flexor. But that's how I met my husband. Paul was the physical therapist my coach called to meet with me after hours.

The first time I went to New York, I went with my first boyfriend, Clark. His dad had just bought an apartment in New York, and my dad dropped us off, and we were there for a week on our own. I must have been 15 or 16. I remember I went to Harlem and bought a goose jacket. That was the hip, hot thing.

I needed to be sexier. I needed to be more hip. I needed to be more edgy and this and that. 'No, don't write that kind of song, write this type of song. No, don't work with that producer, work with this producer. No, don't wear those clothes, wear these clothes.' And I didn't want to be a puppet, you know?

We are presented with a unique situation in the black community in that we have embraced the beauty of hip hop, the real rawness of it, the real fun of it, but we also have to address the damage it has done. We have to look at what it's done to our black girls, especially when it comes to domestic violence.

The prison-industrial complex, poverty, and the school system has more effect on a young black male in America than Jay-Z does, by far. And that's not a diss to Jay-Z. The crime rate in the black community was high before hip hop. Rapping about it is just a reflection of the life a lot of people are living.

Imagine if Lin-Manuel Miranda had tried to do 'Hamilton' first in Hollywood. They would have told him, 'The forefathers weren't Latino or black. They didn't speak in hip hop.' That would never had gotten going in Hollywood ever. But theater let Lin-Manuel him do it, and he created an incredible masterpiece.

I do heavy weight deadlift squats, shoulder presses, push-ups, and I can pull up my own body weight. And I do an ab workout just about every night. It's 200 reps of five different exercises four times right before bed: a plank with hip twists, side bridge dips, a walking mountain climber, bicycles and leg lift.

The music that I listen to on set really varies. When I need lots of energy and I'm dying down towards the day, I need to play hip hop or rap or else my energy just crashes after a long day. When I'm shooting something moody or where I have to play it down a bit, I'll play Lana Del Rey or something more mellow.

I would like to encourage hip hop artists to invite those of us who are in the queer spaces in, so we can have those conversations. I love hip hop. If you bring me in the studio, I know how to act. And we can talk about what's not cool because, clearly, there's still homophobia that penetrates in all these areas.

My main inspirations come from early '90s Trance, the French electro movement round '06, then a bunch of artists like Flying Lotus, J Dilla, Moby, The Prodigy. So I'd say it's some kind of experimental electronica with a strong hip hop influence. It's chilled, but people can still get super crazy and dance to it.

I am healthy. I have been blessed with a very good body, and I have worked hard at it. I had surgery on my toe, and I'm still recovering from that. That's the only joint that was hurting. Earlier, I had a knee replacement, hip replacement, shoulder surgeries, but I have been lucky. I don't feel any pain when I play.

I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick.

One of the things that makes me most happy about music is that I can look at a picture and see Da Brat, Missy, Lil Kim, Left Eye, and I know Aaliyah is a singer, but to see them all in one photo together hugging and laughing and really having genuine love for each other... I want to feel that with my hip hop sisters.

There was a point in the latter 1990s at which, suddenly, every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: 'Look at us! Our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!'

I don't understand why people make me want to make music that's a join-the-dots thing by numbers. I find it really difficult when people say, 'Aw, you should have made a really big hip hop record, that would have been really good for you' or, 'You should have made a song like Lily Allen, that would have been so great.'

I know that everyone has their own ideas about what the good life is, and hip hop has especially strong ideas about it. It's been the same old thing for years and years: a bunch of females around you, nice cars and money. I wanted people to know what the good life actually is and challenge a lot of the lies that we're told.

I feel like a lot of people in the hip hop world don't take me seriously as a rapper, and I feel that first-and-foremost I came up as a rapper before I started singing. All a lot of people know from me is 'Cupid's Chokehold,' and they don't scratch the surface and see beyond that dude who sings the song about his girlfriend.

I can debate for weeks whether a trouser should sit on the waist, or a centimetre below, or on the hip, whether it should have a zip or a button, because I find personally that a detail like that can have a massive impact on how I carry myself that day. If I wear a slouchy jean, that will affect my posture and my whole manner.

At, like, 11, I think, that was just me watching a lot of YouTube videos, and I whenever I had the chance, I would talk to myself, practise pronunciation. Then I found out about hip hop and became friends with American people through Twitter. I was like, 'Yo, I need to be in a country where everybody speaks the same language.'

I hate leg exercises. I hate one-legged squats. I hate the hurdles and the split squats. I hate all the leg exercises. I know they help me, and I'm able to move around and don't have knee problems, and my hip doesn't hurt anymore, but when my trainer tells me I have to do them, I almost feel like my body goes into convulsions.

Somewhere down the line, the evil ones stole the legacy of hip hop and flipped it to a corporate type of hip hop. They decided to tell everybody 'Well, this is what hip hop is,' instead of coming back to the pioneers and getting the true definition of what hip hop is and what it was and what we been pushing for all these years.

I have to put a business model together because certain businesses are approaching me as a legend, as if I'm on my way out. Same goes for the way I get presented on the VH1 Hip Hop Honors and BET. I get lifetime achievement awards because of who I am and what I've done, but they want to put me in a place, as if I'm on my way out.

My definition of hip hop is taking elements from many other spheres of music to make hip hop. Whether it be breakbeat, whether it be the groove and grunt of James Brown or the pickle-pop sounds of Kraftwerk or Yellow Magic Orchestra, hip hop is also part of what they call hip-house now, or trip hop, or even parts of drum n' bass.

The thing that I like about Pee-wee is it can exist on the level of midnight college cult movies that the hip kids are into and, at the same time, it could be something a kid and his family watch together. Being able to straddle both lines of being subversive and, at the same time, very inclusive - I love that about the character.

The objectification of females is not a good thing! Not every rapper does this, but when the lyrics focus solely on the strip club, 'poppin' bottles' and how many girls they can 'tap,' it distorts what kids are learning. I think if there was more of a female presence in hip hop we could break up the monotony. It's all about balance.

Hip hop is usually a bunch of guys talking to a bunch of guys, in my experience. It's homosocial, not homosexual, in that it's almost always all one gender in a room where it's being created. That locker-room environment has an impact on the language. I think the music suffers 'cause it allows an almost cartoonish level of misogyny.

Growing up in a cold place, in Southern Ontario, Woolrich was a brand of choice for us because it was always warm and comfortable. The parka with the fur on it was standard fare for us. It's extraordinary that they have kept up with the times. Beyond the parka, they have changed, and they have some pretty hip, cool items which I wear.

I'm excited to create more awareness about the importance of giving the youth of America a choice. There's a 24-hour music channel. There's a 24-hour comedy channel. I believe there's a 24-hour gay channel coming. Why isn't there a 24-hour Christian channel that's edgy and hip and cool and new and different, like all that other stuff?

When we moved to England in 1986, I was ten years old and I didn't know anything about punk or hip hop. The only words I knew in English were 'dance' and 'Michael Jackson.' We got put in a flat in Mitchum, and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night.

For instance, one big issue in hip hop is the gay thing. It's 2013, and it's a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It's crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip hop is small-minded or stupid - and that's not the case.

Talking about remixes, some people like to preserve what is original and some people give it a new meaning. Coming to Hip Hop, the biggest of the artists use sampling. You are changing the genre of the song and to be able to give old music in new package is also fair and people who have emotions attached to it - they are also not wrong.

I mistakably paid respect and condolences to the wrong Beastie Boy member King Ad-Rock when it should have been MCA. In light of this, I am redoing the song 'Hip Hop Speaks From Heaven' and I am pulling the original version off of my digital release. Historical accuracy is extremely important to me, so I accept all responsibility for this error.

Style-wise, Valle Nevado is what can only be described as 'hip international.' Brazilians, Chileans and Europeans make the place seem like an electronic music festival transported to an remote Andean valley. Huge speakers blare out thumping, bass-heavy music, while promotoras stalk the staircases selling everything from Red Bull to mobile phones.

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