A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement

I’m gonna try and change the course of hip hop again.

In our hip-hop lives we make rhymes we make beats we go big or go home. – Esme from Sister Mischief

I think of hip hop as a mass media, radio, MTV thing. It’s been extremely relevant over the last 10 years and rock music is just not anymore—-a tear rolls down my cheek as I...

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn’t correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

This one is for our crew, but it’s also for all the weird girls and word nerds, for all the in-the-middle wickeds and queers and misfits and hell-raisers.

…We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter. We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall...

post-that.”

Make money make moves.

Hopeful dreams – even where crack kings’ and dope fiends feast. Dust from the ash and rubble; they shine like bright stars once the mic is gripped and the bars are spit.

A poet’s mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

The human body is the best work of art.

As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop’s irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative,...

When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a ‘ratchet’ bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp’s mansion.

Only God can judge me so I’m gone, either love me or leave me alone.

Please, touch me, I pray.

As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the...

Rap in its form is poetry, meaning the point of convergence is words.

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there’d be a rap song for you.

London, London, London town,You can toughen up or get thrown around.

Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.

Rap is supposed to motivate, humours, address societal issues & personal feelings, and also liberate me through art, not insult our women.

Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost...

Over 80 million records sold and I ain’t got to do it with tens or eleven year olds.

I believe…that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die...

No, I don’t like you, I just thought you were cute enough to kiss you.

This kid was writing saying that they were breaking down some of the racial lines in their towns and communities, because their break dance crews were mixed race, and they didn’t give a fuck. They...

I wanted to be sure that my donation did two things: went directly into the hands of hurricane victims and that it was an amount that could really impact their lives and make a difference,

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?

You can be the ugliest man in the world but once you got money, you can have all the women in the world.

Hip-hop…has been the proverbial key that’s opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet.

I wanted to be sure that my donation went directly into the hands of hurricane victims,

The only reason I am successful is because I have stayed true to myself.

Hip-hop is storytelling.

If there were no guns, we couldn’t talk about it… You turn on TV, you see soldiers marching with guns. We only talk about things that’s happening.

Fear not of men because men must die. Mind over matter and soul before flesh.

Hip-hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca.