A Quote by Big Daddy Kane

Early on I was a fan of Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers. I liked the way that he used a bunch of words to rhyme together in one line. And I picked up sarcasm by watching the older cats at the barbershop. They were just out there talking and saying slick lines to one another. I also got inspiration from Smokey Robinson.
The flow that I use, I really developed my rap style in the mid '80s based on Grandmaster Caz from the Cold Crush Brothers, from listening to him. That's like really who I pretty much patterned my style from and I just really took it to another level once I had the opportunity to get out amongst the world myself.
Barry White, Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield are big influences for me. But I'm also a metal head. I was in a bunch of punk rock bands. The Bee Gees, hip-hop and the Beach Boys are just as much of an influence on me as Smokey.
The only recording studio was in Motown - it was called Tamla/Motown at that time and we used to audition there because Smokey Robinson was at that studio and Berry Gordy was the president. I remember asking Smokey to listen to my group and he did. For the first couple of years we were just singing background. We used to back up Marvin Gaye; Mary Wells was there then, Marv Johnson, the Marvelettes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Junior Walker and the All-Stars.
Farrakhan got everybody together for the Million Man March and everything. But Farrakhan don't like the Jews. Which is bugged. I get my hair cut on Dekalb Avenue. I never been in a barbershop and heard a bunch of brothers talking about Jews. Black people don't hate Jews. Black people hate white people! We don't got time to dice white people up into little groups. I hate everybody! I don't care if you just got here. "Hey, I'm Romanian." "You Romanian cracker!"
In 1967, in DeKalb v. DeSpain, a court (255 F.Supp. 655. N.D.Ill. 1966.) took a 4-line nursery rhyme used by a K-5 kindergarten class and declared the nursery rhyme unconstitutional. The court explained that although the word 'God' was not contained in this nursery rhyme, if someone were to hear the rhyme, he might think that it was talking about God - and that would be unconstitutional!
Full disclosure here - I had a terrible crush on Smokey Robinson, like every other female on the planet.
When you come to the Bay, we always had this slick talk. E-40 made it real famous. We make up words. We talk real funny. When you hang around a bunch of Bay cats, you're like, 'You guys are funny.' But that's our way.
I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.
I grew up saying, 'I want to be famous,' but that was just the words that you used. As I got older, I understood that what I really meant was, 'I want to be successful.'
When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.
Since I was growing up, I liked love songs - Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke. That was the kind of songs getting the girls dancing.
My story really is incredible. It's got a bunch of story lines - the garage-built thing. I'm an older guy. It's out in the middle of nowhere, plus the flat Earth. The problem is it brings out all the nuts also, people questioning everything. It's the downside of all this.
In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. All the fathers were foreign-born - Welsh, Irish, Polish, Sicilian. We were so jammed together, we picked up each other's accents. And we spoke some broken English. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country.
I grew up with 2 older brothers, the oldest of which was big into film. Hanging around him got me seeing so much good stuff at an early age. Maybe a 10-year-old should not be watching 'Boyz N the Hood' like 10 times in a row? I don't know. But it probably shaped me in some way.
Early on in my life, I got two older brothers; we used to listen to Eminem, 50 Cent, Lil Wayne.
He liked the way her hand felt in his, liked the simple intimacy of the gesture and the way it said - without the need for words - that they were together.
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