A Quote by Mat Kearney

I think you can hear all my hip hop influences in 'Just Kids.' — © Mat Kearney
I think you can hear all my hip hop influences in 'Just Kids.'
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.
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.
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?
The question 'Why white kids love hip-hop?' forces us immediately to deal with the historical weight of race in America. On the surface people see hip-hop and race as nothing new. I think the ways young white Americans are engaging hip-hop suggest something more.
You can't argue that hip-hop rots away the moral character of kids or rots their brain and still see middle-class white kids going to college who are listening to hip-hop. Going on to become healthy adults listening to hip-hop.
This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.
You gotta understand a lot of hip-hop kids are going to have the hip-hop mentality. And it's sad because they're not educated enough to understand what hip-hop culture is really about.
My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail.
I love that hip-hop can still provide jobs for niggas to get money and to put their crew on. I would never say that hip-hop is going down. It's cool, but it needs an adjustment. I think that hip-hop just needs a little fine-tuning.
While a lot of hip-hop was inspired by jazz or James Brown samples and was made to be played live in the clubs, I made hip-hop that was made for MCs to eat the mic up. It was an aggressive form of hip-hop. It was made just for hip-hop. It's not made to sing or dance to, though you can if you want.
Man, I feel like hip-hop is - first of all, not even only with just GOOD Music, I gotta say - I think hip-hop is still alive in a strong way, man. I feel really enthused about hip-hop.
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.
After many years of hip-hop as a nation we should have the sophistication to accept that their are distinctions between the corporate manifestation of hip-hop, sold as a commodity and package with sensational race, sex and violent imagery, and the hip-hop culture that kids are living everyday at a local level, which often doesn't dabble in that terrain.
I get upset when people knock hip-hop, because I can absolutely see the musicality in it. These days, when I'm listening to records by hip-hop artists, I hear the production. It's just astounding how great the productions have become.
Radio is less important than it used to be. Kids are not just hip-hop kids, just punk kids, just pop kids, just whatever kids. Everyone is mixing and matching on their playlists.
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