A Quote by Yoon Ahn

We've just been nostalgic about old-school hip hop, listening to it at home and looking at people like Slick Rick and all those guys who used to wear huge jewellery. — © Yoon Ahn
We've just been nostalgic about old-school hip hop, listening to it at home and looking at people like Slick Rick and all those guys who used to wear huge jewellery.
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.
I've been listening to the old school hip-hop stuff and rock like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.
When I was still back in Cameroon, because I didn't know English, I used to listen to French rap all the time and then a little bit of American hip-hop. And then, when I got to the States, that's when I really got into all those guys - Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, all those guys.
I'm really into old school music when hip-hop first came out with Common, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Run DMC. I'm really into that! Hip-hop these days isn't the same and doesn't have the same sound anymore. I'd rather listen to the old school hip-hop.
I wouldn't compare my sound on the mixtape to anything, but my influences are like - the minimal amount of hip-hop that I actually do know - because I didn't grow up listening to hip-hop like that. No one really put me on to hip-hop like that... My dad's from Jamaica and my mom is from Barbados, so that's really the stuff I grew up listening to.
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?
I love listening to old records to keep nostalgic feeling; it allows me to not lose the love for hip-hop.
Slick Rick has always been one of those guys real good at telling stories.
That's why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It's worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that.
I like hip-hop personally. It is a genre I am very attached to and have been listening to all my life. But I have always engaged with foreign artistes, never with mainstream Indian hip-hop rap space.
A lot of the things I do deal with my race, but my race is who I am. I'm an American kid who grew up listening to predominantly hip-hop. I will talk about hip-hop as the music I grew up listening to, and I think sometimes people like to put it as, 'Oh, well, he's talking about black things.' And, yeah, they are, but that's my American identity.
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.
This is where hip-hop has become so doomed lately, in this confusion that rappers are street guys. You are not street guys. Get out of that mentality. It's killing hip hop creatively, and it's killing morally. I just think it's a disaster. You're not in the streets and do not be confused about that. You're in legitimate businesses.
There's constantly this melancholy about British hip-hop. People are always waiting for it to explode like American hip-hop, but it might just be that British hip-hop will always be as it is: an underground thing which will stay that way.
I get upset when people knock hip-hop, because I can absolutely see the musicality in it. These days, when I'm listening to records by hip-hop artists, I hear the production. It's just astounding how great the productions have become.
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