Nas Quotes

I'm not the first guy to make a record or to make hip-hop, but I did it differently.

I feel like everything I do in the hip-hop world has an influence. People don't really notice what I did until somebody else does it. As far as hip-hop goes, I want to continue to make good music, and good art. I don't really follow the state of hip-hop.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I'm forever learning and that's why I'm always able to create new styles and new dimensions of hip-hop.

I wrote my first song, 'Conversion', to this little hip-hop instrumental. I went to an open-mic, plugged my iPod into the P.A., and sang over the beat.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I read in an interview with Lil Wayne that he recorded a mixtape of something like 50 straight minutes of him rapping all of his material because he felt like he could never move on to the next phase of his musical exploration if he didn't get it down on tape.

That's the reason why I'm making albums. That's the reason why I love hip-hop: It's a challenge every time.

We'll never change the fact that we are hardcore hip-hop and we make rebellious hip-hop music, and we're going to keep doing that and progress with our production, progress with our lyrical styles, be creative, and just have fun with it.

I started singing because it was a natural evolution in hip-hop to me. Without Prince, I wouldn't have embraced that. I wouldn't have been able to embrace me.

I listened to a lot of old school, golden era music. It gave me a lot of insight on how to rap and give my all.

It's a lot different being a hip-hop artist. You just show up with a piece of paper with your words on it, say it in the mic, then you leave and some other guy does all the music.

All music now is influenced by Hip Hop. It's so deeply ingrained in the culture.

For anybody to say well this is not Hip Hop and that's not Hip Hop, that is not the way the formula was laid down. It was for the people who were going to continue take anything musically and string it along.

I couldn't have written things like 'Low' and 'Heroes,' those particular albums, if it hadn't have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

Hip-hop is a beautiful thing. I think that the music genre itself has created more millionaires than any other music genre before it, especially in our community.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

My main objective with every album is to capture a moment in time, which usually makes the whole process very relaxing. I only discover in retrospect when looking back at the songs how my life is going!

As long as I'm around the cats in the hip hop scene, they'll throw me a track and I'll write a rap over it.

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

I think that hip-hop has done what it was supposed to have done, which is it defied all the laws of what is statistically a music genre and what statistically is not a music genre. Because it wasn't supposed to be here.

I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.

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.

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.