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I can't look at TV without seeing something that's been influenced by rap. Even commercials for cereal. When I was small, I was a fan of cartoon characters - now the cartoon characters are rapping!
I started rapping towards the end of middle school. In high school, with a lot of my friends, we would make beats and just start rapping - beating on the wall, beating on the table and freestyling.
I don't have to work on it. I'm naturally a writer. The rapping and writing, they can go hand-in-hand - but rapping is an art that you have to practice and master, so I worked at it for a long time.
I had some really early recordings when I was 16 or 17. I was rapping over jungle beats with my friends. We used to do pirate radio stations in my area, down near Brighton. They were pretty terrible.
I had to work a lot. I was doing YouTube videos, but I wasn't getting a lot of love. How do I make a living off rapping when no one knows me? I got kind of discouraged. But hard work shuts people up.
I remember hearing Will Smith, back when he was just a rapper, saying, 'When all the other rap stars are in bed, I'm practicing my rapping.' I try to be like that. There is always something to improve.
I always knew that I would be some type of public figure, but I never knew that it would be rapping, 'cause my dad sang: I saw him deal with the ills of the music industry, just on the outside looking in.
The type of music I make, it's not just straight-up rapping. There's emotion in it. That's why people feel each song differently. I get all my vibes from rock music, you know? All my melodies and all that.
I was the kind of kid who loved singing. I loved rapping; I loved attention. But for me, it was more about chasing the dream of being a superstar because of the town I was from and because of what I'd seen.
Toasting is basically what you call rapping. It came off of playing the beats at the parties, however it be. You find a space in the beat, and you have somebody live just basically saying rhymes over the beat.
I was making all my own beats, and I really liked sampling stuff, like old '50s and '60s pop and soul and doo-wop records. I was chopping those up and putting loops and drums on them and just rapping over them.
I am my own parent when it comes to rapping and do impromptu stuff. Being a rapper, you have to be good at improvising, like you give me a word and I have to rhyme it quickly and then make sense out of the rhyme.
People who know my music are like 'Yo, that's Steve G-Lover rapping this 'Paper Boi' song. It's hot. I need this song.' It's funny because the song came about so fast, but the idea had been simmering for a while.
When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, 'You should switch this over to rapping.' I went home and did that - started putting my poems over rap.
When I heard my first rap song and figured out what that was, I kind've stuck to it. I always wanted to be a musician in general, an entertainer. I just started rapping. I never decided, 'Oh, I want to be a rapper.'
It's our approach to treat each show like an arena show. We over-invest in production to make the stage look bigger, turning the show into an experience and not just somebody standing around with a microphone rapping.
Usually, my rhymes are just in my head. I start off with a theme, and once I start rapping and writing and singing, the chorus and all that, it just starts flowing. Then it's done in about an hour! I write a lot of songs.
When we were growing up, I got kicked out of Timbaland's house every day. He was the DJ for my brother's rap group in junior high school. So I was 7, and while Tim's DJ'ing and my brother's rapping, I'd be upstairs dancing.
I done paid Gunna to write my songs. I never put the songs out but like when I first started rapping I used to pay him like $100 like 'I'ma give you a $100 write something for me so I can try to learn to go in and record it.'
People were talking while I was playing, so I got up and left the stage. I've gotten to the point where I'm not really very patient with patrons rapping during the show. And the people were all nice and quiet when I cam back.
My come-out record, '10 Day,' was the thing people were supposed to hear and figure out 'he's good' or 'he's not good.' 'Acid Rap' is the comeback tape, and it asks way bigger and better questions than, 'Is he good at rapping?'
I started rapping before anybody had ever bought a car from it. It was truly about the art form and the culture, more so than now, where it's a successful way to make money. Back then you had to be doing it because you liked it.
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.
My mom made me read a ton of books, so I got good at words and understood the English language. So when I started rapping, words were something I knew. I learned how to manipulate them so that I could say whatever I wanted to say.
I grew up with park jams. That's how I knew about rap... The local MCs would grab the mic and start rapping. I just used to be so in awe and fascinated and like, 'Wow, this is amazing!' But I would never, ever touch the mic. Heck no.
Styles move too fast to be partial to anything. If it's funk, that's enough for me. I don't care how fast or slow it is. I got my grandkids up front rapping and doing the new thing. They're teaching each other, bringing us up to date.
Usually, I think of the song, and then the video plays out in my head as I'm writing the song. I started rapping to become a comedian, so I'm certainly thinking about the visual component of things beyond just the music most of the time.
I was like 13, 14 years old. I had a Rock Band mic, and I used to record music and put it on YouTube and DatPiff. Then I started getting to producing my own music because I didn't want to keep rapping on beats I was getting on SoundClick.
I feel like, O.K., if I can make it as a singer, then let me try rapping. If I can make it as a rapper, then let me try writing. All right? If I make it as a rap singer and writer, then why not try to produce? I don't feel limited in any way.
I knew I could rap a little bit, which is not the most unique way for being funny. The more I did it, the better I got at rapping, and then I fell in love with the craft of it, and the possibility that I was a good rapper was very intriguing.
There's been lots of theater that uses hip-hop in it, but more often than not, it's used as a joke - isn't it hilarious that these characters are rapping. I treat it as a musical form, and a musical form that allows you to pack in a ton of lyric.
There are certain things that I wish people knew - certain things that I feel I started and certain things that I'm responsible for. Sometimes you wish people knew where a certain style of rapping came from or who was the first one to say whatever.
Early on, it was real tough for me to stick to my guns and say 'I'm retired, I'm not rapping, don't ask me for nothing.' But I had to do that because I love rapping and I love music, so if I don't do that, you can't be halfway in it and halfway out.
I had been introduced to rapping in a way where women and people did it, it was structured. It had this very very political structure to it and if you didn't follow the structure, you weren't considered validated or real and that just gave me anxiety.
My own rapping skills are quite good, actually. You get this thing, I think it's called Songify or AutoRap, and you talk into them, and they auto-tune it and make it into a quite interesting musical number. And I got one where it builds it into a rap.
My ultimate goal is my son, and a lot of other kids, to not have to grow up the way I grew up. I just give them a different outlook on something. I want to let them know they can have this much fun by doing something legal like me rapping for instance.
I've never seen Kendrick Lamar crack a joke, and I've met him, but I'm sure he's hilarious, too, just because he's so good at rapping. J. Cole is a funny guy as well. Drake is funny. But who's the funniest guy I've met who is a rapper? I would say 50 Cent.
When I say that I'm not dancing, people get it confused, like I'm not going to do anything outside of rap. It's not that. When I leave this earth, I want to be remembered as an M.C. But I'm definitely going to touch a lot of other genres, not just rapping.
I'm definitely inspired by Michael Jackson. I watch all his videos all the time. And Busta Rhymes, early Busta Rhymes - I really was inspired by him. He's really the reason why I started rapping. Because all his visuals. I loved his videos when I was younger.
I've been in the newspapers since I was about 15 - not for rapping, but for real substantive stuff I was doing in the community, organizing around gang violence in the schools. So I had already made my grandma proud before I was on TV. I've always been who I am.
We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, 'We should do it.' We weren't making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.
I really didn't want to rap; I was just a regular kid. My friend - his name is William Aston - we went to the same high school together, and he was rapping. He put out a freestyle over Chris Brown's 'Look at Me Now,' and it was fire, and the whole school went crazy.
I was, like, 12 or 13; the first hip hop song I tried to rapping to was Macklemore's 'Thrift Shop,' and my English was so bad, but learning to rap to different songs really helped me with my pronunciation, and looking at the lyrics on Rap Genius and stuff like that.
I started rapping at the age of 12. That's when I wrote my first song, but I was more intrigued on learning how the recording process works: how do you create music and what materials I needed. So I educated myself musically so that I could focus on creating my own.
I was a rapper. The reason I stopped rapping was because I realized that people wanted guys like Puff Daddy. That's not what I do. I quit. That was it. I had to sacrifice for my choice. I said, 'Forget it. I'll be a producer.' Nobody was going to make me do anything.
There was this hip-hop collective called People Crew. And at the time in Korea, there was no real place to access rap music. So People Crew used to host this summer school program, which taught rapping and dancing. I begged my mom to attend that school to learn how to rap.
Rapping can be repetition sometimes. Sometimes you gotta highlight your words in a certain kind of way. So I always was a fan of sing-rapping. It was always funny to me a little bit, and I think that being funny and being able to laugh, even at yourself, is a form of flattery.
I've never got the vibe that they would do a gospel song. 'Cause when they talking about doing another Geto Boys album I said I would do it if I could rap like I'm rapping on my gospel album, I didn't get a whole lot of cosigning on that from all the political parties concerned.
'So Icy' is always going to be one of my favorites because this is a song that blew my mind. I was just making beats for the fun of it. I went to the club and heard the song being played, so I asked the DJ to stop playing the song, and the whole club started rapping word for word.
Before I was rapping, I was always around the rap game, even though I was in the streets. I would be at all the parties and all the events, and I was pretty hard to miss. I was one of the few Spanish cats sitting there with jewelry on, Dapper Dan suits. It was pretty hard to miss me.