A Quote by Lil Nas X
I was just trying to fit into a certain spectrum. Just like, basic rap.
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I don't know where I fit in the spectrum of rap yet.
I'm to trying to say I'm something I'm not. Black people understand that. I'm just doing my raps, my way. Rap is black. I recognize that and respect that. I'm just a white guy trying to rap, and I got lucky.
I wasn't trying to fit into a thing... it was not like I was like, 'Right, I'm the Han; I'm the Leia; I'm the Luke.' I was just like, 'Okay, I'm Rey, just trying to do me, just trying to do this scene, trying to do the right thing,' and I think that was a huge advantage because I think if not, it would've been a very different thing.
I had written rap songs in the early '90s and even did a couple homemade rap songs with my brother in like '88 or '89, but it was just like... I don't even know how to say it. Just plain rap. I was just rapping about whatever, there was no real style or direction, it was just semi-braggadocious rhymes that probably imitated 100 other rappers.
If you want to be unhappy, uncomfortable, and insecure, just spend your life trying to do something that is not right for you. It is just like trying to wear shoes that don't fit.
People are very adamant about maintaining a certain sound or a certain era, like, "There were three years of rap that were great, so let's just keep doing that." The genre itself is just stuck in place. It's been treading water for a while.
You had Cash Money: that was just the flashy dudes. Like I said, you had different genres of rap, and we were just one of them. So that's how we fit in. What makes it all confusing - and this is where it's the gift and the curse - we never set out for hip-hop to turn into just something flashy. That was just our thing. It wasn't everybody's thing.
They thought we were just basically keeping ourselves underground on purpose. And it was just strange for people to approach music that way. And for rap, trying to get recognition, and be seen as a regular form of music like anything else. I mean, the Soul, R&B, Rock 'N Roll, they would dis the hell out of rap when it first came out.
There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.
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.
Like so many kids, I just wanted to fit in, and I see now that I spent most of my life trying to be what I wasn't, trying to get people to like me.
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?
It seems other rap artists are trying to follow a "tradition", or something... I don't consider us [Migos] as weirdos, we just went the other way and didn't follow the rap tradition. We just killed it and made it our tradition.
Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.
I'm not big on trying to label it [my rap] or trying to prove people otherwise. I'm just making records that I like and that I wanna make. I'm just making records that relate to me and that relate to my life. If you listen to what I'm saying I'm not talking about anything that isn't my life. I take pride in having truthful lyrics.
And after a while, you just pare things down more and more and more, until you get to certain basic things which just - basic ideas which just seem to work for you over and over again.
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