A Quote by Isaac Hayes

A certain administration which I won't call by name took the arts out of the schools, and that left the brothers out on the street with nothing, so they went to the turntables and started rhyming. Then they had a way to express themselves, and that's the birth of hip-hop.
I think hip hop is dead. It's all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It's all commercial now.
If you are successful because of Hip Hop, which I am, then you have to recognize that Hip Hop is nothing if not a product of the street, therefore you have to give something back.
I started DJing soundclashes. I used to go to Jamaica a lot. I was like a hip-hop sound boy, where I took the dancehall culture and mixed it up with the hip-hop as well. I kept going, going, and I got real hot in the streets of Miami - you know, doing pirate radio - then ended up doing 99 Jamz, the big station out there.
In my opinion, hip-hop has a lot to do with rock and roll, because at one point it was considered an alternative - edgy, independent. Hip-hop is pots and pans the way that punk is garage. You make something out of nothing.
Hip-hop started with street poets with great lyrical skills, and that's what hip-hop has always been about for me.
Everyone uses grime as a footstool, but imagine Biggie Smalls started doing hip hop, and it started going well, and then he started making RnB: there would be no hip hop!
This is where hip-hop has become so doomed lately, in this confusion that rappers are street guys. You are not street guys. Get out of that mentality. It's killing hip hop creatively, and it's killing morally. I just think it's a disaster. You're not in the streets and do not be confused about that. You're in legitimate businesses.
Even though hip-hop started as a battle format, different artists appeared on each other's records or hung out in the same clubs, supporting each other. That was a profound influence. Also, hip-hop, to me, represents limitless possibility. Hip-hop is always evolving. People say, "Oh, it's a very commercial thing, it's too R&B." But in six months, a record is gonna come out that will completely change that.
I've been writing songs since I was 10 years old and always had a penchant for rhyming. I started listening to hip hop through my friends and fell in love with it.
There's a Universe Instrument, where we apply Hip-Hop to astronomy, and we flush out the chemistry of Hip-Hop. We also flushed out the astronomy, to see where Hip-Hop is read in the stars.
To me, that's the biggest problem with hip-hop today is the fact that everyone believes that all of hip-hop is rap music, and that, when you say "hip-hop," it's synonymous with rap. That when you say "hip-hop," you should be thinking about breakdancing, graffiti art, or MCing - which is the proper name for rap - DJing, beat-boxing, language, fashion, knowledge, trade. You should be thinking about a culture when you say, "hip-hop.".
I'm a child of the 70's. R&B to me is Curtis Mayfield. Then a transition came in and I was part of the Hip Hop era when Sugar and Kane came out. That was a good transition for me. Then now R&B is Hip Hop and Hip Hop is R&B.
In this time, we incorporate money and media, and it's split up like apartheid, where when you say "hip-hop," you think just rap records. People might have forgot about all the other elements in hip-hop. Now we're back out there again, trying to get people back to the fifth element, the knowledge. To know to respect the whole culture, especially to you radio stations that claim to be hip-hop and you're not, because if you was a hip-hop radio station, why do you just play one aspect of hip-hop and rap, which is gangsta rap?
But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.
If you want to speak about different ethnicities and diversity, rap and hip-hop are all over the planet. Every country, from Turkey to Australia, now has tons of hip-hop artists. The music and artistry have moved way faster than the corporatization of the music. You do need organization and opportunity for these artists to express themselves, and I don't think it has to come from a corporate co-signing.
My definition of hip hop is taking elements from many other spheres of music to make hip hop. Whether it be breakbeat, whether it be the groove and grunt of James Brown or the pickle-pop sounds of Kraftwerk or Yellow Magic Orchestra, hip hop is also part of what they call hip-house now, or trip hop, or even parts of drum n' bass.
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