A Quote by Yo Gotti

I'm one of the few artists who started from the ground up for real. Not taking no records to the radio station begging no DJ to play it. When DJs started playing my records they called me for them. I ain't pull up and ask nobody for nothing, I ain't pay nobody nothing.
I got real bored in '96. Wasn't nobody to fight. Nothing to look forward to. That's when I started playing basketball again. Had I not started playing basketball, my boxing career would have failed. But I went from a sport where nobody could touch me to another where I couldn't touch nobody.
I started DJ-ing in the '90s. DJ-ing is in every record I do. When I make records I make them for DJs.
I started radio, actually, when I was 13. I started DJing when I was 13, but later in that year, I started a high school station at Phillips Academy. I didn't actually go there, but it was in the town I went to high school in. So literally, within six months of DJing, they started mailing me records; it was crazy.
People ask me all the time, 'What do you do for Cinco de Mayo?' And my honest answer is always, 'When I was growing up in Mexico, nothing. Really, nothing. It was a school day. It was totally normal.' But when I grew up and started going to San Diego and started drinking margaritas, that's when Cinco de Mayo celebrations started for me.
I never aimed for the radio, you know? I'm a DJ - I want my records to be played by all the other DJs in the clubs.
I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.
A lot of DJs who started the same time as me, they are not to be seen anymore. And I get so much love and respect from the young DJs, and some of them look up to me or ask me for advice. I am almost like the mentor.
I see myself as real. Like I mean if I was the President I would have a responsibility, because people put me there. Nobody put me here. They just buy my records. They wouldn't buy my records if my records wasn't good. I'm being who i am in the record.
It was just me in my basement honing my skills, hearing songs on the radio and trying to manipulate them and then writing over those, and I started with local artists in Boston, writing records for them.
Early in my career, when I was still learning about politics, when I was wet behind the ears and naive... Up until the time I started radio show, nobody that knew me ever thought I was a hatemonger or a racist or homophobic or sexist or bigoted or any of that. Nobody. There wasn't anybody. Six months after being on the radio with this program, I'd become all of that. And I remember.
People still come up to me and ask me to sign their records. That's right, records! Man, they don't even make records no more!
I started in '88 to play House music, it was a huge revolution for me. I went to London and I saw a DJ on stage and that was crazy at the time. I was one of the really respected and famous DJs in Paris, but they would never show me. I was hidden. A DJ on stage and people dancing and facing the DJ, looking at him? I was like 'wow!'
My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.
Tower Records is like a temple to me. I'll stay there for hours. Nobody can shop for records with me. It drives them out of their minds.
I can work with all these different kinds of artists and still be able to come up with huge records. Not just cool records, but game-changing records.
Yes; my brother Bobby used to distribute records at King Records. I had a job there, too, packing records up and shipping them off. But I always wanted to play sessions at Stax, so I figured out a way to do it.
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