A Quote by Lloyd Banks
If you stay in one place, you can only rap about one thing because that's all you know.
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Rap's the only music that they categorize like that. That's one thing that I hate, like, down South rap, or up North rap. Country is just country rather than wherever it's from. R&B, you don't call it Atlanta R&B, you know what I mean. So that's already like a shot at our culture.
I think it takes a lot to put oneself in a place where, you know, that thing about "Feel the fear and do it anyway." You wonder what the driving force is that makes you want to do that and not just stay in a safer place.
The only thing I knew in the world as a little kid was comedy. And no other kids in my school cared about it at all. There was no one to talk about it with. You know, we're in a geek culture now where comedy is so giant. I'm one of the people that, you know, works on Funny or Die. And there is just a giant culture of comedy nerds. But back then, I was alone, and I had a little confidence about it because I felt like, this is my thing, this is the only thing that only I know about.
Rap is the only super-current music. If you're into reggae or dancehall, and you don't know Bob Marley, then you don't really know what you're listening to. But if you're listening to rap, and you're 15, you're like, 'Grandmaster Flash? Who's that? Public Enemy? Yeah, my dad told me about them once.' And that's just how it is.
My character is meant to know nothing about rap, and not to like it very much, but I know about it, because my kids make me listen to it. There's some rap I do like very much. I like Eminem, Blackalicious.
But, Eminem... No, I've loved rap for a long time, especially when it got out of its first period and became this gangsta rap, ya know this heavy rap thing? That's when I started to fall in love with it. I loved the lyrics. I loved the beat.
Stay because you want to be here. Stay because we would miss you. And stay because you can belong in more than one place, and one of your places is with us.
I rap when I'm rich. I rap when I'm broke. I rap when I'm bullshit in the street. I rap about only having one woman now. If you can look at a continuum of my career, it's been an evolution of a real dude. So when I say I take my wife to the strip club, we're there, at the five-dollar joint. More than anything, I want people to take away that I'm not mainstream act.
I don't have a permanent place where I live. I'm in Atlanta about six or seven months out of the year. I gave up on my place in New York. I don't have a place in L.A., but sometimes when I go there for the hiatus, I stay in temporary housing. It's all over the place, and I don't know where I live!
Hackney gets a bit of a bad rap, but it's the only place I've ever lived that felt like a community. I know my neighbours.
The only thing I know is the only things that I know. You can't ask me to talk about something I have no information on. I stay silent. It'd be foolish. So when I talk about something, it's something I at least have a little bit of familiarity with me.
I wouldn't write about sh*t I don't know. You won't hear me write about politics in Africa and stuff, because I don't know enough about it. And I would never rap about something I can't back up.
To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do.
For you to be able to rap fast and fit many words into a bar, that's what rap is about, the showmanship. That's the thing we're kind of losing now. I'm not saying that the music now is horrible. I mean, I don't listen to it. The showmanship and creativity in rap is what made it special and what made it different.
I've never been a rap guy, I don't really know that much about rap music, to be honest. I like it, but I think what really happened was just my music seems to work so well with rap music.
The big stars in rap, they were too big, so when my rap generation started, it was about bringing you inside my apartment. It wasn't about being a rap star; it was about anything other than.
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