A Quote by Rakim
The golden age was when people were starting to understand what hip-hop was and how to use it. I was lucky to come up then. Everybody wanted to be original and have substance; it was somewhat conscious... There was an integrity that people respected.
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When hip-hop was new and raw, it was all about being an MC. You wanted to be respected as a lyricist. But as the years passed and hip-hop became big business, hip-hop became like country, rock and pop. And so you now have people who write the songs for rappers.
I had no idea how much the stuff I was doing was affecting people outside Oakland. At the time, also, hip hop wasn't able to tour because all these clubs that let hip hop come in now, they would never have let hip hop come in.
I think that's one thing that hinders hip-hop and I think when everybody tries to be the same... That's why people look at the 1990s almost like it was a golden era in hip-hop 'cause it was so much diversity in the music and in the artists. It wasn't everybody just trying to paint the same picture and say it with the same flow.
When I say hip-hoppers, I mean black, white, Asian, Latino, Chicano, everybody. Everybody. Hip-hop has united all races. Hip-hop has formed a platform for all people, religions, and occupations to meet on something. We all have a platform to meet on now, due to hip-hop. That, to me, is beyond music. That is just a brilliant, brilliant thing.
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.
You have a lot of educating to do hip-hop wise in Europe. When you tour, when you go out there, most of the people that come see you at the venue listen to a lot of different kinds of music, not only hip-hop; they're not heads. From time to time you're going to do a little concert in front of three or four hundred people that are only hip-hop heads and they're going to understand and know all about the gimmicks and the swagger but the rest of the people are just regular European people that listen to pop [or] rock & roll.
I come from the golden age of hip hop when all the greats came on the scene.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I am trying to get folks outside the hip-hop culture to understand why, despite the negatives, young people find hope and refuge in hip-hop. I'm hoping that young people immersed in the culture will work harder to capitalize on the possibilities for great social change that hip-hop represents as a national unified cultural youth movement.
Hip-hop was born of people who did not have a voice. They were not heard. And those people exist and are a part of a framework of life... as long as that's true, people will gravitate to hip-hop.
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.
Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.
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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