John Roger Stephens Quotes
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I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative. So whatever. I listen to all if it. Classic rock and classic pop, all of that.
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When I write, I don't really focus on duets or anything like that or whether I'm going to feature this or that rapper. I just focus on just making a great song and figure out the rest later.
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The prison-industrial complex, poverty, and the school system has more effect on a young black male in America than Jay-Z does, by far. And that's not a diss to Jay-Z. The crime rate in the black community was high before hip hop. Rapping about it is just a reflection of the life a lot of people are living.
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As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.
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Hip hop is usually a bunch of guys talking to a bunch of guys, in my experience. It's homosocial, not homosexual, in that it's almost always all one gender in a room where it's being created. That locker-room environment has an impact on the language. I think the music suffers 'cause it allows an almost cartoonish level of misogyny.
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I was around a lot of gospel as a kid.
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Marvin Gaye was one of the coolest. I look to him as a style icon and as an artist.
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Hip-hop is one of the most free art forms there is. There's so many sounds you can use, so many things you can bring in. You never know, man. I bet years ago people would've never said they would hear me with Rick Ross, and we did four classic songs together.
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I'm honestly not a great gift giver. I could give better - my girlfriends have always complained about that.
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In my neighborhood in Springfield, Ohio, there were a lot of young kids. We all played tackle football after school, but I knew very early on that I was not an athlete.
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I always figured I would live long enough to see a black president. The movies predicted it. Usually, Morgan Freeman.
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We have this film that we hope to finance, it's called 'Southern Rights.' It's a documentary about segregated proms that are still happening in the South of America. So there's a black prom and a white prom, so we hope to finance a film soon about that.
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In terms of the technology I use the most, it's probably a tie between my Blackberry and my MacBook Pro laptop. That's how I communicate with the rest of the world and how I handle all the business I have to handle.
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I signed with Kanye back in 2003, and at that time, 'The College Dropout' hadn't even come out, so he was still relatively unknown compared to where he is now. He wasn't a household name; people were still calling him 'Kane.'
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Experience is a great teacher.
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Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.
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Even with G.O.O.D. Music, we have artists that have done very well, and we've had artists that haven't. Being attached to Kanye is only going to get you so far. You've still got to have the records and the talent and the artistry on your own to carry it.
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Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.
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Sometimes there's that perfect moment when the crowd, the music, the energy of the room come together in a way that brings me to tears.
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Well, what's interesting, I try not to think about the radio when I'm writing a song. I want people to love the song, and that means it might not be exactly thinking about the radio, but it's thinking about your audience and saying, 'I want people to like this song after it's done.'
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I've never put out a song that I wasn't completely proud of and that I didn't love. In that sense, I've never felt like I sold out in any way.
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I always felt that rap didn't cause crime; it just reflected it.
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I'm craving more soul, I'm craving more truth, I'm craving more socially - just people that are aware of what's going on in the world.
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Soul is about authenticity. Soul is about finding the things in your life that are real and pure.