Yasiin Bey Quotes
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At its heart, music is all higher mathematics.
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Breathe in...inhale vapors from bright stars that shine, Breathe out...weed smoke retrace the skyline.
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African art is functional, it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing, a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.
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I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater.
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Crack mothers, crack babies and AIDS patients Youngbloods can't spell, but they could rock you in PlayStation.
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I want to be necessary and do good works. I ain't here to waste nobody's time, because I don't want you to waste mine.
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That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.
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They say that when a man faces his destiny, the destiny ends and he becomes the man that he really is.
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I'm really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine. You get to a point where you say, 'I will not take it anymore! I'm gonna do something drastic if I stay this depressed. I've got to break out of there!'
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And from the moment that I saw you, I knew you was trouble, But I disregarded detour signs, And did not stop til you was mine. I guess God was like, 'Aight, fine.' Careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it in heaps. Try to give it back, He be like, 'Nah, that's yours to keep.'
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Peace before everything, God before anything, Love before anything, real before everything, Home before any place, shoot before anything, Style and state radiate, Love Power slay the hate.
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I feel like being into the beat of your own drum has become too prominent in the culture.
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You have to be an extremist to believe that you're gonna be the president of the United States and your name is Barack Hussein Obama! And he's using extreme methods, but his application is very smooth. Michelle Obama is extreme, her presence is extreme. And it's an extreme good. Extreme is not negative.
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Hip-hop is the last true folk art.
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To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.
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This thing called rhymin' is no different than coal minin'; We both on assignment to unearth the diamond.
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To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.
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I'm an independent thinker. And I'm not the poster child for any movement. I'm trying to support whatever's right no matter where it is.
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I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product, not a person, so I've been going by Yasiin since '99. At first it was just for friends and family, but now I'm declaring it openly.
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History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.
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You can positively affect and change a social circumstance with art, and it’s vital that a change happens now.
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I tell people all the time, I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater. But, I didn't wanna do all of this. I would've been satisfied to do it, like, on the weekends among friends, and to have a regular job.
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In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.
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There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music.