Talib Kweli Quotes
- All Quotes
-
But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.
-
Now people won't beat you up if you are gay; they might just talk behind your back.
-
You see somebody rapping and you're like, "Nah, my cousin can do that." You're spoiled by the experience. Overseas, it's still something that people can appreciate.
-
Why give you the cure when the disease makes money?
-
Truthfully I wanna rhyme like common senseNext best thing I do a record with common sense
-
Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You gotta get back to your essence, Use your gifts and share your presence, Don't count your dollars 'til you count your blessings.
-
A flower that grow in the ghetto know more about survival than the one from fresh meadows.
-
When I met you it was magic... We polar opposites, but attracted like we was magnets.
-
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.
-
I try to count the blessings rather than the problems.
-
Just because someone has great content doesn't mean you like them as a rapper.
-
My fans like to be romantic. I feel like I'm creating at least at the same level or even a higher level of creativity than I was at twenty-one. I've gotten better as an artist.
-
"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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Crunk Feminist Collective, I think, is a noble endeavor, and any group of young women coming together to uplift women, especially being run by women of color, I have no choice but to support that. But they're dead wrong on me.
-
If lyrics sold then truth be told/I'd probably be just as rich and famous as Jay-Z.
-
Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build