A Quote by Raekwon

I've been living. I've been doing the writing thing. I've been being the family man. I've been traveling the world. I been to, like, 18 cities last year. I've been getting my thoughts together, trying to figure out what's going on with hip-hop itself.
I've been involved in a lot of different kinds of projects. I've been on straight hip hop tours. I've been on underground rock tours. I've been on multimillion selling rock shows. I've been in the jam band thing, and both commercial and underground hip hop. Very few people listen to one kind of music.
I have been making hip-hop since I was a kid growing up in New York in the '80s and '90s. It's always been a hobby of mine - I've been making beats and writing songs for as long or longer than I've been acting.
There's war - there's always been war, as long as most of us have been alive. There have always been people being abused, there's always been horrible things in the world. Why are we outraged? We should just be quiet and figure it out, and work it out together.
Hip hop has been an integral part of my life and my whole career. I started off doing videos with Ice Cube, and Dre, and Mary J. Blige, and TLC. So I've been involved in hip hop since the beginning.
The thing about hip-hop is that it's from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.
I've always been sure of my vision, but I've been in meetings where men have been talking about me like I'm not there... I've been told I should be a certain way, and I wondered if that would have been the case if I was a man.
I listen to a lot of different music. I love hip-hop. I'm a big underground rap fan. I listen to the likes of J. Cole. Lately, I've also been getting into techno house music. And I've been on an Eighties retro kick, and I've even been experimenting with some rock.
I haven't been an actor who's been able to pick and choose roles, and being a family man, it's been about putting food on the table.
I feel like Hip Hop culture has always been about [fashion]...it started in the street so it has always been a thing of the streets to be first.
Before I realized what was happening, everything blew up. I made 'Animals' when I was in high school, and literally, from that moment, I've been living a different life. I've been touring a lot, traveling a lot, doing great shows. I've been in the studio with my biggest idols.
Well, it's been an interesting career. Since I last appeared on 'Top Of The Pops,' I've been doing about 150 live shows every year. The live shows have always been well received and they consistently worked, it's just the records that haven't been very good.
I've been to Japan, I've been to China, I've been to Africa, I've been to the Middle East, I've been to Europe a little bit. I've never been to South America.
I've been able to be a part of every movement in music over the last several decades. The only one that I haven't been involved in so much is hip-hop, which I chose not to be involved in because it felt like I would be what they called "perpetrating." It felt like hip-hop was so much of its own culture and that I was not part of that culture.
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.
Mix-tapes are something that have been going on for a while. They've been pretty important to hip-hop. It's the way we advertise our music to the public for free.
I had to figure out my own faith. That was something I figured out a while ago when I was 18. But I can always stand on the fact that my dad has been a great example for me. Beyond that, building my career hasn't been attached to my dad. It's been me figuring things out for myself.
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