A Quote by Mike Shinoda

I was a producer and rapper before Linkin Park. Once the band took off, it was the center of my focus. A couple of years ago, I started missing doing straight-up hip hop, and that's when Fort Minor began.
I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.
Linkin Park has been a band for such a long time, for me, in my eyes. I was 16 years old when I first heard them. I heard 'Hybrid Theory,' and I was floored at what I was listening to. It was angry yet melodic, it had hip-hop and it had - it was just different, good. Good songwriting.
When I came up in hip hop, there was no such thing as a Puerto Rican rapper doing hip hop for many mainstream people, so I was the ship, the captain, and the crew.
Hip-hop is the streets. Hip-hop is a couple of elements that it comes from back in the days... that feel of music with urgency that speaks to you. It speaks to your livelihood and it's not compromised. It's blunt. It's raw, straight off the street - from the beat to the voice to the words.
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.
I try to get the hip-hop aesthetic, most times without an MC. I don't use a rapper or a DJ to give it the hip-hop style; it's strictly the band that makes that music, which is a lot harder to do.
I really love Linkin Park, and I loved Chester Bennington, and it is horrible what happened to him. I grew up listening to him because my dad would make these mixtapes with a lot of different artists - Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, The Beatles, Sarah McLachlan, I just really loved Linkin Park, and their production is really sick.
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!
I like upbeat songs, and I listen to a lot of Linkin Park and Green Day. I also like hip hop and R&B artists such as Drake and Rihanna.
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.
Well, we have to realize the truth about the person who is a hip-hop insider. Most of these people are not really insiders. They are people who are chosen to do an interview and they will make a statement and say that they are a part of the hip-hop culture, but from an intellectual standpoint, they are not very sharp, because back in '1990..'91 one would criticize somebody for doing one type of commercial and say that's not real hip-hop and then another rapper turns around and sell them malt liquor and say that's real hip hop.
If I focus on being an activist and my job is to be a rapper, I'm not going to be as good of a rapper. I need to focus on hip-hop and focus on making the music, so that when the activists come to me and they need my voice to create a platform, then I've got enough people listening to me. Not because I'm conscious, but because I'm dope.
I actually fell in love with hip-hop before I fell in love with Jesus. I'm a fan of hip-hop, I love hip-hop. I don't even necessarily want to call myself 'Christian rapper.' You know, I don't want to put myself in that little box.
I feel like a lot of people in the hip hop world don't take me seriously as a rapper, and I feel that first-and-foremost I came up as a rapper before I started singing. All a lot of people know from me is 'Cupid's Chokehold,' and they don't scratch the surface and see beyond that dude who sings the song about his girlfriend.
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.
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
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