A Quote by Queen Latifah

Award shows, like the Grammys, were tough on us early in hip-hop, not even televising our categories or splitting them up on best male or female or any of that. We had to earn them.
The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.
I'm kind of iffy on the Latin Grammys because I think we fought so hard, for example, to get the American side of the Grammys to open categories for us... But I support the Latin Grammys in the sense I'm glad that we have them.
I never go to the Grammys. I just never go. I don't know if I care enough, and I went because my son wanted to go, and they asked us to present Best Hip Hop Group of the Year. You know, we had two records from Compton in there, and it was just like a cool thing to do, and to do with your son, and it was just cool. But we was the first award up, so after I did my thing I just jumped in the car and came on back home.
The hip hop industry is most likely owned by gays. I happen to think there's a gay mafia in hip hop. Not rappers - the editorial presidents of magazines, the PDs at radio stations, the people who give you awards at award shows.
I think one of the reasons I've had success in hip-hop is that I can bring out vulnerability in people who are generally seen as tough guys. To me, when a hip-hop musician always plays tough, I find it annoying because I know they're not really like that - there's something deeper and vulnerable. There has to be, because they're human beings.
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.
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
I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of ballet dancers behind them so I had to learn hip hop really quick.
Though my music audience is cross-generational, like my television audience, my core demographic is people like myself. People who have grown up on hip-hop, but hip-hop doesn't necessarily speak to us any longer.
There needs to be structures in place to do something about misrepresentation about hip hop. When awards are given out and the media talk about hip hop, they're confused because they haven't done their homework on it so you have a case where there's an award for the most pop song in the world and it's called 'hip hop'.
I grew up with, maybe not the best hip-hop in the world, but a lot of hip-hop. Will Smith was, like, my jam when I was, like, 9 or 10 years old.
I have male friends. I'm the type of girl that always had male friends, more male friends than female friends. So just because you see me with the person doesn't mean that I'm kicking it with them, hanging out with them, or we're romantically involved in any way, shape or form.
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.
I wake up hip-hop, Go to sleep hip-hop, Dream 'bout hip-hop, 'Cause I AM HIP-HOP.
The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.
When we were doing shows in the mid-'90s, the audiences were 95% black. What's happened now is the gentrification of hip-hop. A lot of cities passed ordinances that made it hard for black audiences to gather in large groups. Clubs are more open to hip-hop now 'cause it's the same crowd that goes to rock shows.
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