Talib Kweli Quotes
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I look at the deejay thing as something - I'm good at it because I have my own music. I have enough rhythm to blend at this point.
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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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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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Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
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Truthfully I wanna rhyme like common senseNext best thing I do a record with common sense
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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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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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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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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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Why give you the cure when the disease makes money?
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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 try to count the blessings rather than the problems.
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When I met you it was magic... We polar opposites, but attracted like we was magnets.
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I have such respect for the art of deejaying. I hesitate to even call myself a deejay.
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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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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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A flower that grow in the ghetto know more about survival than the one from fresh meadows.
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To be honest, that whole exchange with Crunk Feminist actually made me write the song because I realize there's a lot of young women out there so hurt by the misogynistic images in hip-hop they paint it with such a broad brush stroke that they think anybody that defends hip-hop is defending misogyny.
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Just because someone has great content doesn't mean you like them as a rapper.
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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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The founder of Crunk Feminists is a Christian. If you claim to be a Christian, but then you attack somebody for saying you should approach a problem with love, you're not being a true Christian.
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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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Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build
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You gotta get back to your essence, Use your gifts and share your presence, Don't count your dollars 'til you count your blessings.