A Quote by John Cena

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. — © John Cena
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.
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.
You start learning English in fifth grade. I was 12. But even before then I was listening to American music. My neighbor was a really big hip-hop fan, so he taught me everything around hip-hop.
First thing you have to understand is that freestyling is much different than making hip-hop music: there's another whole element to being a hip-hop MC.
I always say to people that I left hip-hop in '97, meaning that I departed from listening to predominately hip-hop and just started really getting into records from the late '60s, early '70s. And once I made that change, I realized how much great music was made back in the day, and it started to become apparent how much we've lost in music.
I've been writing songs and making music since I was probably ten years old...so my inspirations back then, I don't know - I guess it was something that was innate. I was really shaped to make hip-hop music and love hip hop.
I was a hip-hop head. When I really found my own lane in music, it was hip-hop. I wanted to make hip-hop music. And I did, I made a lot of hip-hop music.
I wouldn't compare my sound on the mixtape to anything, but my influences are like - the minimal amount of hip-hop that I actually do know - because I didn't grow up listening to hip-hop like that. No one really put me on to hip-hop like that... My dad's from Jamaica and my mom is from Barbados, so that's really the stuff I grew up listening to.
I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, because that was new music for me. I really hadn't been up on them. I mean, I'd heard of them, but I wasn't up on their music. And I kept listening to Radiohead, and I was like, Man, I want to make hip-hop that feels like Radiohead. I want to make hip-hop that can use guitars and soul and jazz and just fuse it all together.
Hip hop has been an integral part of my life and my whole career. I started off doing videos with Ice Cube, and Dre, and Mary J. Blige, and TLC. So I've been involved in hip hop since the beginning.
I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.
I think that people have been claiming hip-hop as being dead since the moment it started. I think there are people - and I can be included in that category sometimes - that get frustrated feeling like maybe the industry has handcuffed itself, or trained its artists to do or think about music in a way that classically hasn't led to the greatest records in hip-hop.
Hip is to know, it's a form of intelligence. To be hip is to be update and relevant. Hop is a form of movement, you can't just observe a hop, you gotta hop up and do it. Hip and hop is more than music Hip is the Knowledge, hop is the Movement. Hip and Hop is Intelligent movement
Socially, hip-hop has done more for racial camaraderie in this country than any one thing. 'Cause guys like me, my kids - everyone under 45 either grew up loving hip-hop or hating hip-hop, but everyone under 45 grew up very aware of hip-hop. So when you're a white kid and you're listening to this music and you're being exposed to it every day on MTV, black people become less frightening. This is just a reality. What hip-hop has done bringing people together is enormous.
I actually grew up break-dancing. When you break-dance you listen to hip-hop and rap, so I've been listening to that music since I was a kid.
I do hip-hop music, and I've gotten famous off of hip-hop music, and I know that I'm successful, and I've created my own definition of success, what success means to me. So the hip-hop world is all just really fake to me.
I feel like everything I do in the hip-hop world has an influence. People don't really notice what I did until somebody else does it. As far as hip-hop goes, I want to continue to make good music, and good art. I don't really follow the state of hip-hop.
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