A Quote by Wyclef Jean
What a lot of people don't know is that Wyclef started off as a battle rapper, when he decided that he would rhyme.
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I've never been the straight rapper that is going to stand in a cipher and battle all day. I started off battle rapping, but to me, making songs became more important than freestyles... I've met many rappers who can freestyle but can't make a record.
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.
I decided to do what I do when I was 2 years old. At 2 years old, you know, I heard the sound of a drum playing in the village, and I found my own drum and just picked it up and started playing, the worst song ever written by Wyclef Jean.But it actually started a vibe.
Rhyme to kill, rhyme to murder, rhyme to stomp,
Rhyme to ill, rhyme to romp,
Rhyme to smack, rhyme to shock, rhyme to roll,
Rhyme to destroy anything, toy boy.
On the microphone:
I'm Poppa Large, big shot on the East Coast.
Rakim is a great rapper, but, you know, he's not a battle rapper.
I don't think I'm good, I don't think I'm a good rapper. I think a lot of people always want me to battle somebody and stuff like that which is cool, but I don't see myself as a rapper.
I started listening to rap music in 2012 or something, because that was when I started becoming friends with American people, and they showed me rappers to listen to. I actually started listening to Macklemore a lot. He's the first rapper I started listening to.
I am my own parent when it comes to rapping and do impromptu stuff. Being a rapper, you have to be good at improvising, like you give me a word and I have to rhyme it quickly and then make sense out of the rhyme.
I would never challenge any rapper to a rap-off. It's weird, I'm not that type of rapper.
Without the piano, I would never have attempted to rap, because I'm a poor rapper. I'm enthusiastic, but it takes me a long time to write eight bars of rap. I would battle any pianist, and yet I would forfeit happily before even getting into a rap battle with anyone.
Think that I started taking emceeing very serious probably from the very beginning. Because I started as a battle rapper. It was something that I was doing hoping that I could hang with my older cousin.
I just kinda do what I feel. I never knew what lane I would fill, [or that] I would fill a lane at all. I didn't even really contemplate that far down the road. I just started having fun, and a lot of that came from me seeing Wayne dare to be different, and I started feeling like I can be a multifaceted rapper. I don't have to be a one-dimensional female rapper. Once I put that in perspective, it was like everything just got easier for me, because I no longer wanted to fit in anybody's box... I just wanted to be Nicki.
I started off as a rapper from Thunder Bay, Ontario, believe it or not. There was a little group of 10 or 12 of us that would get together and copy each other's cassettes. So I was a rapper first, and it was that music that got me into this great entertainment world and got me out of Thunder Bay.
I'm a comedian, and I decided I wanted to be a comedian when I was eight years old watching old Saturday Night Live episodes. I never decided to be a rapper because I'm not a rapper.
A lot of us have classical and jazz training, and it would be hard for us to work with a hip-hop artist who doesn't know a lot about the technical aspects of music. But when you listen to Wyclef's records, you hear bridges, chord changes and real structure. You can tell he has big ears.
'Masquerade' is the autobiography of Wyclef Jean. A lot of people know me through my work with Carlos Santana or Destiny's Child, winning all those Grammy Awards, but you do not know what is going on inside me.
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