Talib Kweli Quotes
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Why give you the cure when the disease makes money?
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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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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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Let me finish my music, and let me present it the way I want to present it. And then share it, put it online, do whatever you want to do after that.
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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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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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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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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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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'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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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 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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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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I have such respect for the art of deejaying. I hesitate to even call myself a deejay.
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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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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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If lyrics sold then truth be told/I'd probably be just as rich and famous as Jay-Z.
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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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When I met you it was magic... We polar opposites, but attracted like we was magnets.
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Just because someone has great content doesn't mean you like them as a rapper.
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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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The way I feel about Crunk Feminists. Here you have a bunch of bloggers who are not even quoting any feminists' works who are telling me what I can do better when I've been doing this as my life's work while y'all still in college! What are you talking about? And their criticism was of the idea that we should approach people like Rick Ross and Lil' Wayne with love when they have lyrics that we don't like, as opposed to approaching them with hate. That's their issue: How dare I say I approach Rick Ross with love!