Hip-hop is really standoffish. It's really competitive and it's really about who's number one all the time. Sometimes it gets out of hand.
Rhyme is cool again. It's because of hip-hop. Bless you, hip-hop.
Since I was a kid, I was listening to hip-hop.
I love rapping. I do. My styling's similar to Missy Elliott - I think she's so dope. In a weird way, that's how I first learned the American accent: doing American rap songs.
Honestly, a lot of pop records have beatboxing. Timbaland beatboxes on his tracks. Justin Timberlake beatboxes.
A lot of times, when people say hip-hop, they don't know what they're talking about. They just think of the rappers. When you talk about hip-hop, you're talking about the whole culture and movement. You have to take the whole culture for what it is.
I knew I wanted to be a rapper when I was, like, 5.
Oh, hip hop is always changing.
I'm an urban act.
I learned to MC over drum 'n' bass music.
I never knew anything about rapping.
I started rapping when I was about 12 or 13, just playing around with it.
I don't think rap really fits in to 'American Idol' in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.
Rap - it's a childhood passion. Writing rhymes, it's something that I was doing before rap records even existed. And I will continue to write until I can't write anymore.
Hip-hop was fast, originally. It was always fast music.
I'm here to inspire young people to be part of the most magnificent culture on earth: hip-hop.
There was no hip-hop before Afrika Bambaataa.
I don't really write. I'm an on-the-spot type of person. This beat, let's listen to it; let's vibe. And then I'll do a melody, and then we'll go back and do it.
Some MCs don't take the time to take a beat home or just vibe with it and just figure out, 'How do I attack this track?'
I was not an athlete, but I was a break-dancer. I was a beatboxer, an entertainer.
Hip-hop was started on groups.
Ever since I was a kid I've been rapping.
Hip hop is the new rock n' roll, you know what I mean? And anybody who doesn't think that is just sort of living in the past. It's all just American music, really, when you get right down to it.
I can beatbox. Well, sort of. I have one beat that I can do, but people get fooled.
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.
