Top 1200 Conscious Rap Quotes & Sayings

I have a song that's called 'Rap Dreams, Hoop Dreams'. Besides education, everybody's got hoop dreams from day one in rap. Rap, sports, music have so much of an impact on the world.

I can't stand rap....people who can't sing do rap....you can sing rebellion as well as talk it....Hitler would have been in a rap band.

If you're a conscious rap artist and you're worried about Billboard charts, you're gonna have a problem.

We have to remember examples of many artists of conscious rap who have been coopted by the Department of State of the United States to be cultural ambassadors in different parts of the world, like Syria, like other parts of the Middle East, including conscious Islamic-American rappers that are representing an international political agenda for the United States through cultures more affable for people of color in other parts of the world.

I feel like when it comes to rap - like, real rap music - and knowing the pioneers of rap, I feel like there's no competition for me in the NBA. Other guys can rap, but they're not as invested or as deep into actual music as I am and always have been. I think that might be what the difference is. I'm more wanting to be an artist.

We have to remember that the experience of gangsta rap as such in its foundation is an anti-systemic experience primarily. And it is an anti-systemic experience that is not in some cases politicized, but in general results in a much more transgressive, much more uncomfortable music for the structures of power, than conscious rap or political rap.

I always do my rap from the outside looking in. Like I do my rap as if I'm looking at me rap.

I thought that God and rap would never work. I thought that God wasn't okay with rap. People knew I used to rap, and I went to the Bible studies. Someone said, 'Hey, you should rap about Jesus.'

I've never been massive on rap, but there's that whole kind of culture of U.K. rap.

When you talk about rap you have to understand that rap is part of the Hip-Hop culture.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Rap has so many possibilities that need to be explored. There are different factions of rap, but some are in a rut. Rap doesn't have to be about boosting egos and grabbing your crotch and dissing women. There's a way to make political and social issues interesting and entertaining to the young rap audience.

For you to be able to rap fast and fit many words into a bar, that's what rap is about, the showmanship. That's the thing we're kind of losing now. I'm not saying that the music now is horrible. I mean, I don't listen to it. The showmanship and creativity in rap is what made it special and what made it different.

There has been an effect of business rap on the output of today's rap music. But I don't think that's the modern day rapper's fault.

I just want everybody to have fun. When I came into rap, that was my whole inspiration. That's what rap used to be about.

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

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.

I can't really rap the way rappers rap; I drive a 2002 Toyota Avalon.

The first rap album I bought was Eminem's The Slim Shady LP so I wasn't even based on West Coast rap like that.

I don't listen to rap all the time. Even though I rap, rap can be nerve-wracking.

I guess, like, I've always listened to rap, and I remember I specifically started listening to, like, pop-rap when I was, like, 11, you know, like Shaggy. I love Shaggy. And then I discovered, like, underground rap when I got to high school, and really, that's when it kind of blossomed. I don't feel like my love for rap blossomed off of Shaggy.

As a conscious rap artist, you should not want to be in a gangster market. You should be trying to establish your own market, create a place where you can be yourself and make some money and feed your family.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

I believe a lot in gangsta rap, I see in it a lot of positive things as it is. I believe it is only about doing politicization work. Revolutionary change will come from there, it won't come from conscious rap.

I never tried to emulate that New York rap style. What I do is a quasi rap. It's a honky rap, not a black rap. I find it puzzling that so many people have assumed I'm black.

It's not that you don't make any money doing conscious rap music. You make a lot of money doing this, but if you're greedy and you're not satisfied with $500,000 a year, and you want $2 million a year, then you will suffer as a conscious rap artist.

The big stars in rap, they were too big, so when my rap generation started, it was about bringing you inside my apartment. It wasn't about being a rap star; it was about anything other than.

Rap, rap! upon the well-worn stone, How falls the polished hammer! Rap, rap! the measured sound has grown A quick and merry clamor. Now shape the sole! now deftly curl The glassy vamp around it, And bless the while the bright-eyed girl Whose gentle fingers bound it!

That's one of my struggles as a hip-hop artist. If I feel like doing a super conscious song where I don't even rap.

Conscious means "having an awareness of one's inner and outer worlds; mentally perceptive, awake, mindful." So "conscious business" might mean, engaging in an occupation, work, or trade in a mindful, awake fashion. This implies, of course, that many people do not do so. In my experience, that is often the case. So I would definitely be in favor of conscious business; or conscious anything, for that matter.

I rap when I'm rich. I rap when I'm broke. I rap when I'm bullshit in the street. I rap about only having one woman now. If you can look at a continuum of my career, it's been an evolution of a real dude. So when I say I take my wife to the strip club, we're there, at the five-dollar joint. More than anything, I want people to take away that I'm not mainstream act.

I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I'm conscious of the mainstream without selling out.

Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ.

I love rap lyrics, I love hearing people rap, I love molding a thought or idea into the shape that fits on a rap beat.

I don't have any sympathy for the subject matter, [but] I have great respect for rap artists. In fact, not for the rap artists, but the people who make the music over which they rap. Rap music - the music itself is incredible - but [the people that make the music] are hardly ever credited.

What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature alone cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.

I've never been a rap guy, I don't really know that much about rap music, to be honest. I like it, but I think what really happened was just my music seems to work so well with rap music.

My music isn't rappity-rap-rap-rap.

I mean I'll be retired from rap, so what I'll be doin' in rap will be for fun.

I guess rap has such a bad name, because everybody can do it now, and that's probably why people don't want to be considered as rappers anymore, they're not taken seriously anymore. But yeah, rap is definitely the core of what I want to do. But I'm also an artist so I try to do as many things as I can, but I always keep rap in the equation.

The rap on Obama has been that he is a little too cool and aloof. The rap on Romney may be that he is just plain callous.

It becomes necessary to realize that the body is not conscious, but we are conscious of the body, also that the mind is not conscious but we are conscious of the mind.

I don't really listen to rap; I just like to rap.

You can't expect to be on MTV and critique George Bush. You can't expect to be on BET or the cover of 'The Source' advocating Jesus Christ or Buddha or Hindu Krishna or Moses. As a conscious rap artist, you have to play in the arena that you're supposed to be in. What is that arena? That arena is the college market. The conscious rap artist woos the college market, even though the college market is the wildest, most sexed-out, drug-driven market in the country, possibly the world.

I've been called everything. Gangsta rap. I've been called conscious rap. You know, everything. Whoever feels like calling it whatever they want to call it, that's on them.

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail.

But, Eminem... No, I've loved rap for a long time, especially when it got out of its first period and became this gangsta rap, ya know this heavy rap thing? That's when I started to fall in love with it. I loved the lyrics. I loved the beat.

Who gave it that title, gangsta rap? It's reality rap. It's about what's really going on.

I was, like, in a rap gang. I loved rap, and it was all around me.

We used to have MTV and all these ways we can show our videos, and it was these rap shows, and it was everything. And then it became not cool to be conscious; it became cool to just hang out. Escapism rap became the norm. And, when I say "escapism rap", I mean getting high, get your cars, get your money, get your jewelry, go to the club, have your women, and it just became all about escaping your reality and not making your reality better on a real tip; not just on the have fun tip.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

Rap's the only music that they categorize like that. That's one thing that I hate, like, down South rap, or up North rap. Country is just country rather than wherever it's from. R&B, you don't call it Atlanta R&B, you know what I mean. So that's already like a shot at our culture.

I look at WorldstarHipHop in the morning, Bossip, Global Grind, and everything in between, but it's all so quick, I don't even think about it. And I've never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music.

90% of the people that rap are just rappers, they rap what they see, a lot of them exploit other peoples lives, I've been through it all, I don't glorify it cos when I was in jail, I wasn't like YES I'm in jail now I can say that in my rap.

The average rap life is two or three albums. You're lucky to get to your second album in rap!

I never liked socially conscious rap. I like rap that's physical, that's about a beat and bass and repetition.

You gotta do a lot more than rap. Rap is not just rap. If you don't have an image, you're not capturing nobody's attention.

Everybody in the '80s, well, we hate rap. Now, the biggest rapper in the world... Eminem. Rap's a black thing.

Rap is hardcore street music but there are women out there who can hang with the best male rappers. What holds us back is that girls tend to rap in these high, squeaky voices. It's irritating. You've gotta rap from the diaphragm.

Skateboarding was my introduction to rap and the first rap song that I really liked was KRS-One 'Step Into A World.'