A Quote by Masego

I've always been attracted to something that's a little bit left - Korean R&B, South African hip-hop. I'm really curious about my homies back in Jamaica, what are they listening to? I'm always searching.
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 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 always been able to do sprinkles of hip-hop here and there in all my albums, but I'm not sure how my fans are gonna feel about coming out first with something that's so hip-hop.
I like hip-hop personally. It is a genre I am very attached to and have been listening to all my life. But I have always engaged with foreign artistes, never with mainstream Indian hip-hop rap space.
Hip-hop ain't died because of the South, that's retarded. When I named the album originally, I thought I bit off more than I could chew but you'd be an idiot to think I'm talking about how the South killed hip-hop or how New York isn't where it should be or where it once was. It was like, "Damn, I need to explain this?" But I thought, "Nah, the proof is right there. We should know what it is." I expect the hip-hop audience to be avant garde. I want them to be where I'm at or beyond where I'm at.
Somewhere down the line, the evil ones stole the legacy of hip hop and flipped it to a corporate type of hip hop. They decided to tell everybody 'Well, this is what hip hop is,' instead of coming back to the pioneers and getting the true definition of what hip hop is and what it was and what we been pushing for all these years.
There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.
I know that people everywhere listen to hip-hop, but especially being from the South, you really get that influence. You go out, you party, and it's just always there. Also, I grew up listening and loving reggae music, too.
Hip-hop started with street poets with great lyrical skills, and that's what hip-hop has always been about for me.
I guess the difference between the Korean hip-hop scene and the American hip-hop scene is that in the American hip-hop scene, you know, they have their Jay-Zs. They can become conglomerates through hip-hop. In Korea, it doesn't happen.
From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There's hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.
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 remember those moments in my life when the tape came out on that Tuesday, and I went to Sam Goody to cop it. And sitting and listening to it. In awe of the music I was listening to, but also imagining this music at the hip-hop clubs and with the homies in the car.
Hip-hop has always been speaking about the way your brain is manipulated by stress and struggle because hip-hop is borne from struggle.
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?
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