Afeni Shakur Quotes

Kendrick Lamar is a great, great thinker. He's a tremendous artist.

Tupac was a glorious person, and he had all the right intentions.

Someone like Roman Polanski comes with a lifetime of achievement, cinematically.

I'd love to be the female Kanye. I think he's so cool and effortless.

Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.

By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.

I'm mostly concentrating now on continuing to make history in Hip-Hop, making everybody proud of me, I'm not just a rapper now, I'm in history now.

Kanye West is my favorite artist.

Kendrick Lamar is the real deal. He's a real artist, and he's gonna be here for awhile because this guy is seriously talented.

Tupac is my favorite artist, and he had mad style.

Kanye is one of my favorite producers and artists.

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 helped me learn about a whole bunch of American culture.

I just respect Kanye as an artist.

I have been skeptical, sometimes, about the importance of rap music, which I think is a capitalistic project to make money.

I think Kanye West is - people don't give him the credit he deserves for what he has brought to our generation.

I don't want people to confuse me as an MC that talk about nothing.

I love Kanye West. I think he's a visionary. He's one of those people for whom I separate his personality from his artistry.

Kendrick is phenomenal. I've never tried and practiced a song that was as hard as when I practiced Kendrick's verse on 'Control.' He's a genius. I think that people do recognize it.

Oprah Winfrey has a spiritual connection with so much of this country, and it was built over years and years of doing that talk show.

When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, 'You should switch this over to rapping.' I went home and did that - started putting my poems over rap.

Nas' longevity comes from him having strong lyrical value in his songs, him being more like a poet and improving over time.

Historically, hip-hop is about a generation of artists rapping about the realities they see in their neighborhoods or the 'truths' they hear growing up in their homes.

Rap music was and is, for me, everything.