I feel like your city - with hip hop in particular, because we're always beating our chest and shouting where we're from - your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York - KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.
I've been everywhere man. I'm from L.A., though.
While I'm a New Yorker at heart, and 'Harlem Honey' runs through my veins, Atlanta - its awesome residents and glorious landscapes - has a special place in the hearts of my family and I.
I've always belonged to the street, and I always will. It's in my DNA.
I came from the heart of the ghetto - there ain't no suburbia in me.
Rap is from the streets and I'm from the streets. That's why a lot of people accept me.
Hip-hop started with street poets with great lyrical skills, and that's what hip-hop has always been about for me.
I have a huge affinity with London, and I have a lot of relatives here - now and before I was born. I pretty much look at London as the centre of the universe.
When I was with Washington, Portland, Detroit, everybody still got love for me and I still got love for them.
My dad grew up in Washington Heights. I grew up in New York in Manhattan. So we're purebred New Yorkers.
I'm a creature of the New York City streets.
Michael Jackson was part of that tremendous wave in the ocean of human expression and it happened to be located first and foremost in Gary, Indiana, working class.
I want to be heavily tied to a city that I write for every week, that knows my stuff and I can interact with.
I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood, Paramount, California, outside of L.A., like near Compton, that's where I'm from.
Jazz came from the streets, hip-hop came from the streets. It's just a different language. It's all borne out of hard times, struggle, and the fight to have equality and things be better.
Hip-hop originated from the Bronx specifically; that means everything. I'm down the block from where hip-hop was born and raised, so I'm glad I am here and I'm able to represent New York the way I am.
I'm very much half city and half country boy.
L.A. is my American city.
I'm from a rough place: the Bronx.
Work and friends keep bringing me back to Chennai.
I come from a young, hip-hop, urban world.
I was born and raised in New York City, Manhattan, uptown.
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'm not leaving New York. And neither is anyone else. We're here. We are quintessential Americans - we're not only American, but New York-American.
Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.
