Joe Cole Quotes

Rap is definitely a youthful expression.

I was born in D.C. on 8th Street. I know what's up. I know what time it is. I used to hang out in Brooklyn and in the Bronx as a teenager. I know what the real world is like.

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

Dizzee's just my childhood hero. He's definitely the inspiration. He's got himself to a very good place. He's defied the expectations of what British black urban music was like. He was the first person who made the rest of Britain realise it wasn't just a one-album-type situation. You've got to take your hat off to somebody like that.

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking.

The kids that are making the ghetto stuff I can't even reach are the ones that are inspiring me to play music for the other kids in the city they don't even know about. If I don't get those kids making music, there won't be an original kid DJing like me in five to 10 years.

I got a job as a human rights and refugees officer, working on youth-based projects. But I realized all the kids I was working with were far more into 'The Daily Show' than the policy briefings.

I think Katy B encapsulates young London in a way I never could. She reps London harder than anyone song-wise since Lily Allen.

I remember listening to Cube's music when I was like 14 years old, my friends listening to it up in Toronto.

Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it.

Growing up in New York City and hip-hop are two inseparable things, two things that are totally intertwined in our lives.

Growing up in the mid-to-late '90s in London, you start seeing the explosion of drum'n'bass and then the birth of U.K. garage and grime. I decided to focus a lot of my energies as an aspiring MC. It was a very natural way to express yourself as a kid from a certain kind of neighborhood.

I really like the whole urban, hip-hop kind of thing.

Knife crime isn't an issue that's going to go away just because of repression and police action. Of course we need to support the forces, but it's linked to prevention, and prevention often comes through education.

I think the grime scene is one of the sickest, most diverse scenes ever.

It's not just my music. Not everyone just listens to grime now 'cause of Skepta. They like how we speak. They like the slang. They like how we dress. They listen to the music. It's everything.

I consider 'Dope' a part of the new mainstream.

Washington D.C. and the entire DMV area are very dope places because they're such musically-inclined areas.

I really enjoy the immediacy of the 'knife and gun clubs,' as they're so callously called. Emergency is a great place to learn about people.

I think we're always doing something for teenagers and youngsters because BTS originally performed itself as a socially conscious band. We always wanted to sell our performances like we did with our debut.

Rag 'N' Bone Man is for everybody, like Wu Tang is for the children.

My older sister was into grime, so she got me into it. When I was ten, I begged her to take me to my first house party, where there were decks and a mic. I ended up falling asleep standing up in the corner.

I was always interested in acting and writing, and I honestly thought I'd make my name as a scriptwriter one day. But somehow, I ended up in London in the early '70s, and that's where I had my David Bowie adventure.

From the age of 14 onwards it was really punk rock, The Clash particularly. I think I learnt more from them than I did at school, because that got me into fashion, politics.

We grew up listening to music like that: we grew up on the snap music, grew up off the trap music, grew up on all the South sound.