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When break dancing was out, I break danced. When rapping was the thing, I freestyled rap on the street and battled and all that kind of stuff.
Rapping and singing are not two polar opposites. There's so much middle ground. And I think there's a lot of people who find that middle ground.
When I first started rapping, I used to just jock Jay Z super hard. Back when I was like 14 and 15, it was, like, Jay Z, Ice Cube, and Lil Wayne.
Throughout my rapping career, I always cooked for myself and anyone I worked with. It's what actually kept me grounded through those crazy years.
Me as a person, man, I'm just rapping reality. Every time I get in front of the microphone I'm just speaking about real life and what's happening.
You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.
I was just rapping as a pastime and I became good at it. So much so that by the time my Def Jam contract was in front of me, I didn't have a rap name.
I was 17 when I first started rapping and 18 before I started taking it seriously - when I really knew I could rap and have fans and be a trendsetter.
I think somewhere along the way I realized, 'O.K., no one's gonna care about a chubby Jewish dude rapping.' I realized I'd be better behind the scenes.
I don't plan to restrict myself to rapping in the future, and I didn't want to come off as too aggressive, which is why I thought about changing my name.
I don't know how I started rapping. The first I did was at school. I tried writing one. I liked it. People started to like it. It was what I wanted to do.
Rapping was something I always wanted to do, so after school, my friends and I would catch the bus to my house and just sit there writing songs, every day.
Once I started rapping, I had to start dancing more. I had to really use my craft, and take everything I did for fun and put it into my professional shows.
If I wasn't rapping about politics, then I might have been just another person trying to sell albums, and I might have sounded like everyone else out there.
Myself, I'm just a simple country boy who spent time on the streets and developed a style of writing and rapping and a cool sound that people seem to enjoy.
I'm thinking of the kids of the next generation and the music that they need to hear. Before, I was just rapping to rap. Now, I'm rapping to change the world.
Me and my dad used to go to these jam sessions and open mic nights, but I was always scared of singing on stage. It felt different to rapping - more pressured.
I was singing R&B before I was rapping, and I never really enjoyed it. But when I started rapping, I was like, 'This is sick - I'm actually alright at rapping!'
I went in reverse with this whole thing. People I've toured with were kids who consumed as much hip-hop as they could. I didn't do that until I started rapping.
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.
Jay-Z was huge. I was like 2 years old throwing up my diamond, rapping. I know all of 'The Blueprint.' I've heard that album 1,000 times. And 'Reasonable Doubt.'
You don't have a lot of women doing things for women, so when I'm rapping I gotta talk all this mess so the women can feel as confident and empowered as the men.
I would say Tupac influenced me the most to start rapping, but as far as a female icon that I've looked up to since I was six or seven is definitely Gwen Stefani.
Songwriting was definitely first. I started singing, and then I was rapping; then I went back to singing. As I was growing up, I just taught myself piano and guitar.
I started rapping because I wanted people to hear what I have to say, I want as many people to hear me as possible, and I do everything in my power to make that pop.
We always do kinda like the bare bones representation or variation of the voice and drums, which is what we feel is the foundation or backbone of rapping and hip hop.
I wasn't rapping and freestyling in high school. I wasn't telling people I was gonna be a rapper when I was a little kid. It wasn't set in stone that it was my dream.
Historically, hip-hop is about a generation of artists rapping about the realities they see in their neighborhoods or the 'truths' they hear growing up in their homes.
I love rapping. I do. My styling's similar to Missy Elliott - I think she's so dope. In a weird way, that's how I first learned the American accent: doing American rap songs.
There's been people who've rapped and produced - like Kanye - but I don't feel like on the rapping side there's ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.
I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.
The first thing I ever put on the Internet was actually a beat tape, but the first thing I ever put on where I was rapping was called 'Generation Y,' and it was hella political.
I was rapping because there were so many things that I wanted to say. There weren't enough words for me to articulate all of the things that I wanted to say in a three minute song.
Around when I turned 17 and I bought my own studio equipment and started recording myself, I kinda found my own voice. I just started rapping like my normal self and this happy guy.
When I was just straight-up rapping, I feel like everyone wasn't paying attention as much, but the moment I started singing - case in point, 'Clout Cobain' - it affected more people.
Rapping for me is more about being entertaining and giving something back to the fans. I want people to say, 'There goes Pooch holding his own with Consequence, Rick Ross, and Drake.'
My parents are both into music. My mom sings and my dad plays piano, so there was always music everywhere. I was singing at a very young age, but I actually got my buzz through rapping.
I'll be honest with you: before I heard Nicki rapping, I probably wouldn't have thought to rap myself. Just to see a female doing it and being in there with the guys, it was motivation.
He's been my number one influence. If you say Tupac didn't influence you, then you don't really need to be rapping because nobody evokes that kind of emotion on a track like Tupac does.
It's funny, when you have a theme so particular to cows - or it could be anything like hair or nails - when you're rapping about a specific thing, you can have more punchlines about it.
When you listen to records like 'Foreclosure,' that's like me sitting in a room by myself just rapping about things that's running across my mind and things that have been bothering me.
I always laugh when I listen to my old stuff. I was just trying way too much back then. Doing too many harmonies and too many runs and all the crazy stuff. Rapping all funny and animated.
That's what my music... I'm working on a solo record right now, it's gonna be more hip-hop than anything, like electronic hip-hop, futuristic hip-hop. I'm probably gonna be rapping on it.
A friend of mine encouraged me to try rapping, so I started experimenting with it, writing verses, seeing if I could fit an extra word or syllable into each line without tripping myself up.
I just listened to regular commercial music from Korea. I would just follow the choreographed dance routines. I didn't have any ambitions of pursuing rapping. I liked dancing, so I did that.
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.
The song that's affected me the most profoundly is probably Michael Jackson's 'Thriller,' or, more specifically, the couple seconds of instrumental break before Vincent Price starts 'rapping.'
My sound is, at its core, a mix of things. Definitely an imperfect mix, but one that incorporates elements of the music I love - a bit of indie rock, super rhythmic rapping, and lots of synths.
I am hoping to improve my writing and rapping, as well as get a better grasp on how to make beats and music that complements what I do vocally. It's a learning process that hopefully won't end.
Nothing I do is ever void of melody. I know it might seem like I'm doing a lot of rapping, but I'm always utilizing tone and trying to find a key signature. So, I don't look at myself as a rapper.