Talib Kweli Quotes
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I like the fact that I can rep New York, but my style does not - I'm not trapped in a New York thing. I can do art songs with other artists and it's seamless.
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"Art Imitates life," of course, is that phrase by Oscar Wilde. I called that song "Art Imitates Life" because Oh No was in the studio and he actually came up with that hook. When I was trying to figure out a name for the record, it just kind of made sense.
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Why give you the cure when the disease makes money?
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No one likes to be treated like people in minority communities. What it's saying is that because you're poor, because you live in a neighborhood that deals with oppressed conditions, you deserve to be treated like a criminal. In our Constitution it says you have the right to live without illegal search and seizure.
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A flower that grow in the ghetto know more about survival than the one from fresh meadows.
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You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.
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But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.
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Truthfully I wanna rhyme like common senseNext best thing I do a record with common sense
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I gotta be dope first. I gotta be appealing to your senses, and to what you like first. Then the message happens. Then you relate to the message.
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When I met you it was magic... We polar opposites, but attracted like we was magnets.
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It’s very seductive to focus on what you don’t like as opposed to celebrating all that it is that you do.
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Who you? Your name smaller than fine grains in couscous It's the highest calibre, your calibre is deuce deuce
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I feel like people mislead themselves when they tell themselves they're into me because of the lyrics. From my vantage point, people aren't into me because of the content, because of the lyrics. Because there's a million of rappers who have great content.
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Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.
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I think the biggest problem in our country is mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. From the Rockefeller drug laws to stand your ground to stop and frisk, all these are pointing people, especially and disproportionately black and brown people, towards the criminal-justice system. It's depleting whole generations of people.
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There just needs to be a gay rapper who's better than everybody. That's when that question will no longer be able to be asked.
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Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
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When I was a teenager, the way some of these kids out here be actively gay, it would have been ridiculed in the hood. And now the hood is a bit more accepting. Begrudgingly accepting, but definitely more accepting than 20 years ago when I was a little kid. That doesn't mean that anybody should stop fighting for equality just because people are begrudgingly a little more accepting.
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With Prisoner of Conscience, the focus was - I've worked with Madlib, High Tech, Kanye West, J Dilla. I feel like I've worked with some of the greatest of all time. That's been overlooked. That's been overshadowed by the weight of the lyrics.
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Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build
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I'm not an artist that has a big, huge radio record that's going to be on BET. I'm not, at this point, gunning for like, "Oh, I'm gonna kill them in the first week." But as people slowly discover the album they realize it's better than a lot of what they've been listening to all year.
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God gave us music, so we play with our words.
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The thing is, allies is people who are friends, people you can rely on in the struggle. You're not always going to agree with your allies. For instance, Stevie Wonder I feel like is my ally when it comes to this Florida situation, but I don't agree with his strategy. That doesn't mean he isn't an ally.
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But Rawkus is integral to what I do, because the cats who started Rawkus are the first ones who really saw my vision, and gave me a platform to get it out there, so I'm definitely totally grateful for that.