Talib Kweli
Michael Bloomberg is a sensible guy. He's just privileged. He's a goddamn billionaire, and he or his family members have never had to deal with anything as remotely degrading as stop and frisk. So he has no point of reference.Collection: Guy
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
When you have a voice and a platform and you know better, it becomes your moral obligation to support that community. And by extension, you're supporting your family.Collection: Support
Now people won't beat you up if you are gay; they might just talk behind your back.Collection: Gay
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.Collection: Uplifting
The thing is, allies is people who are friends, people you can rely on in the struggle. You're not always going to agree with your allies. For instance, Stevie Wonder I feel like is my ally when it comes to this Florida situation, but I don't agree with his strategy. That doesn't mean he isn't an ally.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Christian
Hip hop has always been, for us, for artists who are pure to the craft - any place overseas, whether it's Australia, any place in Asia, Germany, Africa, it becomes something where you can still go and work. Hip hop is an import culture. We're spoiled by it here. It's homegrown.Collection: Artist
Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.Collection: Appreciate
But Rawkus is integral to what I do, because the cats who started Rawkus are the first ones who really saw my vision, and gave me a platform to get it out there, so I'm definitely totally grateful for that.Collection: Grateful
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.Collection: Looks
I have a luxury of people coming to see me whether I play for the crowd or not. I don't take that lightly.Collection: Play
I feel like your city - with hip hop in particular, because we're always beating our chest and shouting where we're from - your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York - KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.Collection: New York
My parents are my biggest influences. My parents and my city. Brooklyn, New York, New York City, the community I grew up. I don't feel like I'm special in that. I feel like that's everybody.Collection: New York
I'm spinning records and I look across the restaurant and I see somebody who looks Asian. And I'm like, "Yo, that looks like Yoko Ono." I'm like, oh, I can just meet - that's going to be great. Then I look carefully and I'm like, "That's not Yoko Ono, that's Bruno Mars." And it was Bruno Mars. That just happened recently. I was bugging out. Because that was totally not Yoko Ono at all.Collection: Asian
But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.Collection: Children
Fortunately, artists can live off their works, if you're creative at how you do it. If you just depend on the videos and the radio, you're at a loss.Collection: Loss
I don’t think that early hip hop stood out to be a social critique. A lot of fans of mine think that hip hop’s ultimate responsibility is to critique social structures.Collection: Responsibility
Music is not an exact science so depending on the time and the mode and the energy when we do it that will determine what happens with it.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Want
I'd like to work with Outkast, I'd like to work with RZA, I'd like to work with Timbaland, York, a whole bunch of people.Collection: People
I was always rhyming and doing it for the love before I found out I was gonna have children and when I found out, doing it for the love wasn't enough.Collection: Children