Jay-Z
Jay-ZBeat is in relation to flow. The beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow.
Boxing is a glorious yet stupid sport in which even the winners get crippling brain damage.
Hip hop is a lot like journalism. One could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.
Hip hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.
Hip hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.
Hip hop is responsible for this being the least racist generation ever, allowing for the club to be a place where all sorts of different people are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music.
New York City is a place made up of a thousand universes that don't always connect but its people all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don't.
The Poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
Racism is taught in the home and it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?
