Saul Williams Quotes

The materialism, the brashness, the misogyny - everything in hip-hop is amplified. Misogyny is a good example of something that is completely amplified in hip-hop. I do think there is more than enough of a balance, though, for fans who are willing to search it out.

Music is always a commentary on society.

Music and fashion are a sign of the times and a reflection of what people want and need at this very day and age.

I think that we, as the African-American men in hip-hop, we have a greater responsibly because we have the ears of so many millions of our young people. And they listenin'.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

I'm very into film and strengthening what it means to be a rapper and to be a black dude from Chicago.

This is more in regards to celebrities. What we've got to understand is that we are the influencers of the hip-hop culture, the black culture. We are the way out, you feel what I'm sayin'? As far as who we look to and where we get stuff from - hip-hop culture is influencing the world, really, but especially the black communities.

In the early days of my carer as an actor, I shared what was then the prevailing attitude of Negro performers :;that the content and form of a play or a film scenario was of little importance to us. What mattered was was the opportunity, which came so seldom to our folks ... Later I came to understand that the Negro artist could not view the matter simply in terms of of his individual interests, and that he had a responsibility to his people who rightfully resented the traditional stereotyped portrayals of Negros on stage and screen.

NWA was all-American; Wu-Tang was all-American. It was just a part of America you may not have seen at the time.

Hip Hop is an extension of our very being, and so the study of Hip Hop is the study of self-expression leading to the study of one's true self.

Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.

I honestly now know that I'm the physical embodiment of hip-hop on earth. That's my only purpose here on earth is to keep the culture together long enough for it to remain everything that we thought it could be when I was coming up.

With my representation of a black woman in the world today, there's such a powerful response from my community about what it means to have black representation on television. That response is so overwhelming and so strong that I just have to express my own gratitude for it, because I understand the necessity for it.

What's 'Atlanta' about? Technically, it's about a couple guys who are friends, but to me, 'Atlanta' is about black lives. I'm getting a real look at what black life means in Atlanta.

I started to think of 'Hidden Figures' as the first part of a mid-century African-American trilogy.

A lot of people in my generation, we use hip-hop as a tool to compose.

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

Pop culture mirrors culture, and, I think, as a rapper, hip-hop in a lot of ways mirrors the things that are happening in urban neighborhoods.

Hip-hop isn't dead by any means, but it's not something I define my black identity with.

I think that sometimes we put undue pressure on stories featuring people of color, and I hope we get to a point where it's not such a rarity to see a person of color be the hero of a story, so that it can just be a story and not have to carry so much weight.

I think, in a lot of ways, hip-hop is interesting to me because it's like the modern-day folk music.

If fashion has a political significance, it is probably culturally, as a camouflage.

The only serious function films can serve is to act as a record of their times.

Our music attracts the people that we rap about and make music about, and they come out and actually do it.

If people perceive 'Roots' to be a black history show, nobody is going to watch it.