John Roger Stephens Quotes
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John legend is a nickname that somebody started calling me a while ago and part of it is 'cos I sound like an old man when I sing.
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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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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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Artists in general never stay in the same place; we keep growing. It's still you: you still have that core that you always had, but you work with new people and hear new things.
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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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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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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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I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.
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Instead of investing our resources in locking people up, let's invest more of those resources in our fellow citizens so they don't end up in the system to begin with. And if they do, they can get back on their feet.
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I was homeschooled for several years.
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If you look at what happened with Underground Railroad, there is so much action. There is so much intrigue; there is so much of historical importance.
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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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The most I ever spent on technology is building a studio - I built one at home in Los Angeles. I can't tell you how much exactly, but the whole process is very expensive.
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I know how it feels to be a singer who wants to get discovered.
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There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I'm just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.
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I think they need to get a more reliable way of watching television on the laptop. Because I travel so much, if I want to watch my favorite sports team it might not be showing in that place, so I want a reliable way to watch whatever I want to watch on my laptop.
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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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In America we have big issues with education - in impoverished communities especially. I work with Teach For All, and so we're encouraging more people to get into teaching.
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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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Obviously, Kanye and I are very different in the way we express ourselves publicly. He's so passionate... about art, about culture, about creativity. And he's really good at it. And that honesty manifests itself in ways that are not politically correct, not socially acceptable sometimes.
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Well, I like songs that have like a little bit of quirkiness to them.
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Being married is not the same as having a kid because being married to another adult who can take care of themselves to a degree is different than having a kid that is completely dependent on you.
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I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.
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I was a busy kid in high school - a little bit of an overachiever, I guess. Prom king was kind of silly, but the rest of the stuff was important to me.