2017 saw a slew of big pop and hip-hop records, a number of breakout female singer-songwriters and all-girl bands, and the return of beloved '60s soul artist Don Bryant and pop star Kesha.
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana... plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.
Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.
It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.
Hip-hop is a cultural expression - it's embracing.
I'm a musician. I play instruments. I dabble in the hip-hop field. That doesn't take vocal ability necessarily.
We gotta let hip-hop grow. We gotta let it go through its different phases throughout the different places that's accepting it.
Hip-hop went through different stages, from the beginning in the streets of the Bronx, to the whole Tri-State area and then to the rest of the United States and the rest of the world.
L.A. hip-hop is so different; it's so diverse. Out here, it's, like, funk-inspired; it's, like, '70s-skating-rink-inspired at times. It's Zapp-and-Roger-inspired; it's house-party-era-inspired.
If you take 'Nothin' But a G Thang' by Dr Dre, that could also be an R&B record. 'Bonita Applebum' by A Tribe Called Quest could even be a jazz record. 'Bring Da Ruckus,' you gotta call it hip-hop.
This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I'm interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.
Ultimately, Dead Prez should have went multi-platinum. But when people didn't rally around them, I knew the black hip-hop audience had become far less politicized.
Fitzgerald coined the phrase the 'Jazz Age,' and now we're living in the Hip-Hop Age.
Hip-hop is the last true folk art.
In the future, hip-hop is going to be called American folklore.
I grew up around salsa, merengue, bachata, bass music, freestyle, hip-hop, techno, house, rave.
Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.
Rap is a gimmick, but I'm for the hip-hop, the culture.
New York is responsible for bringing that raw, that real gritty hip-hop, because we... originated it.