When somebody tells me, 'The Source magazine had you in the Top 5 emcees,' I'm like, 'Okay, that's cool.' The other four may not be who I consider dope emcees.
Back in the days the great emcees made singles, had great shows, won battles, had all the girls and dressed fly. That¹s what I'm about...the total package emcees.
Take 7 emcees put em in a line
And add 7 more brothers who think they can rhyme
It'll take 7 more before I go for mine
And that's 21 emcees ate up at the same time.
You can have a phenomenal booth artist and he can get in there and be a technician in the booth and it won't translate on the stage. I think that's what makes emcees emcees. Some rapper dudes are great rappers but it don't translate on stage.
As a poet, I would always hear emcees come up to me and say, 'Yo, you should rap,' and I was like, 'No.' You know, the label was tough for me. I'm a poet. I was proud of that distinction between the two, not wanting to be the other.
A lot of the old-school artists didn’t even respect what’s being called freestyle now... any emcee coming off the top of the head wasn’t really respected. The sentiment was emcees only did that if they couldn’t write. The coming off the top of the head rhymer had a built-in excuse to not be critiqued as hard
People didn't really take white rappers seriously until Eminem, because he was better than everybody. Like female emcees, you need to be like Lauryn Hill or Nicki Minaj or killing everything before somebody takes you seriously.
Before I think we was emcees, we was more or less narrators too. Because if you look at the early '80s hip hop, it was so much creativity goin' on with artists like then, like Slick Rick, then you had Rakim, and you had these different kind of artists back then. And we was a marble cake of all these artists. So I didn't have a problem with writin' stories because I felt like that was somethin' I loved to do. Even to this day, I really consider myself an entertainer-slash-narrator. I like to talk about stuff that goes on.
I remember when it was just the three Emcees and then Flash put Mr Ness down.
I'm sautéing emcees with fried rice up in the wok without the MSG and chopped celery.
There's the shared imagery between hip-hop and comics, with some producers and emcees taking on super hero personas.
Food for thought, eat my words with your mind:
Emcees are grapes, and grapes are crushed to wine.
I'm going to be one of the top four that's ever played this game, for sure. And if they don't want me to have one of those top four spots, they'd better find another spot on that mountain. Somebody's gotta get bumped, but that's not for me to decide. That's for the architects.
A star's the work - the work ethic you put into the business, and the people you excite. We only wanted to excite only a few people at that time, which was some o' the emcees that was hot that was in the game.
I see it every day: People trying to create a home that somebody else tells them they should have. I don't care if it's a magazine or a bossy friend - when somebody says, 'This is what's elegant, this is what's trendy,' if it doesn't represent you, you're not going to be happy.
A geek is like a dork. Someone who’s on the fringe, who you wouldn’t want to hang out with. A nerd is someone too weird and smart to fit in with the masses. Like me.” “You’re not a nerd!” “It’s okay. I know who I am. I consider it a compliment. I like when people tell me I’m weird.” I cram four Cheez Doodles into my mouth. “I mean, why be normal?
I wish I could pull shorts off. My wife tells me that I just can't. But that's okay. I'm tall, I can do other things, like change light bulbs.