Rap Music Quotes

Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you're always going to find a hip-hop tape; that's all I buy, that's all I live, that's all I listen to, that's all I love.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

When Lin optioned his book, Ron was relieved that the Founding Father who had the most dramatic and least appreciated life story would finally get his due—even though a rap musical was the last way that Ron had anticipated Hamilton getting it.

There was a loud scraping noise as five chairs slid backward. The men rose as a unit. And started coming for her. She looked to the faces of the two she knew, but their grave expressions weren't encouraging. And then the knives came out. With a metallic whoosh, five black daggers were unsheathed. She backed up frantically, hands in front of herself. She slammed into a wall and was about to scream for Wrath when the men dropped down on bended knees in a circle around her. In a single movement, as if they'd been choreographed, they buried the daggers into the floor at her feet and bowed their heads. The great whoomp of sound as steel met wood seemed both a pledge and a battle cry. The handles of the knives vibrated. The rap music continued to pound. They seemed to be waiting for some kind of response from her. "Umm. Thank you," she said. The men's heads lifted. Etched into the harsh planes of their faces was total reverence. Even the scarred one had a respectful expression. And then Wrath came in with a squeeze bottle of Hershey's syrup. "Bacon's on the way." He smiled. "Hey, they like you." "And thank God for that," she murmured, looking down at the daggers.

A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I'd sort of fell the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It's fun, but - somehow - vaguely pathetic.

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.

The art of rap is deceptive. It seems so straightforward and personal and real that people read it completely literally, as raw testimony or autobiography. And sometimes the words we use, nigga, bitch, motherfucker, and the violence of the images overwhelms some listeners. It's all white noise to them till they hear a bitch or a nigga and then they run off yelling "See!" and feel vindicated in their narrow conception of what the music is about.

Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.

Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.

...and - holy shit was this song bad. It was like the singer was stabbing my ear with a dagger made of dried turds.

I don't give a fuck, God sent me to piss the world off.

I think Lafayette wants to rap in French now. I have to go learn some French. Damn it, Lafayette

... her taste in music haunted my memory and I had to stop at Tower Records on the Upper West Side to buy ninety dollars' worth of rap CDs but, as expected, I'm at a loss: [...] voices uttering ugly words like digit, pudding, chunk.

Hip-hop has always been controversial, and for good reason. When you watch a children's show and they've got a muppet rapping about the alphabet, it's cool, but it's not really hip-hop. The music is meant to be provocative - which doesn't mean it's necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it's dense with multiple meanings. Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don't necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head. You can enjoy a song that knocks in the club or has witty punch lines the first time you hear it. But great rap retains mystery. It leaves shit rattling around in your head that won't make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you. Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.

Davis is naturally a sweet-natured person.He's just been hanging around Nick and Gavin too long.Its a wonder they don't have him stealing candy from babies, or blasting rap music out of his car stereo in front of the retirement home.

I need wonder. I know that death is coming. I smell it in the wind, read it in the paper, watch it on television, and see it on the faces of the old. I need wonder to explain what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to us when this thing is done, when our shift is over and our kids' kids are still on the earth listening to their crazy rap music. I need something mysterious to happen after I die. I need to be somewhere else after I die, somewhere with God, somewhere that wouldn't make any sense if it were explained to me right now. At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

Hip hop in my veins, if you cut cut me I will bleed.

Then one of them asked why Japanese kids try to ape American kids? The clothes, the rap music, the skateboards, the hair. I wanted to say that it's not America they're aping, it's the Japan of their parents that they're rejecting. And since there's no home-grown counter culture, they just take hold of the nearest one to hand, which happens to be American. But it's not American culture exploiting us. It's us exploiting it.

All history should be taught through rap by Lin-Manuel Miranda

There is genuine Hip Hop; a message that connects, rocks a crowd, and motivates a people and then there is what is left... instead of Hip Hop we have Hip replacement.

I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American invented rock and roll yet has only been rewarded or awarded for their accomplishments when conforming to the white man's standards. I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American has once again been the only race that has brought a new form of original music to this decade: hip-hop/rap.

My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we should have a music talking about ni**ers and b*tches and h*es. It had no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me, that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

Goodness me! DuBois appears to be black! I’m surprised you allowed it! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk of rap music and basketball?

I t was a well-known fact among Christian homeschoolers that public schools were bastions of gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, rap music, pop culture, secular humanism, witchcraft, and body piercings.

Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.

When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a 'ratchet' bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp's mansion.

The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.

My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs. I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war. So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick. I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this.

I’d spend hours in HMVs, Virgin Megastores and second-hand record shops staffed by greasy-haired 40-year-olds dressed as 20-year-olds, listening to contemporary music of every genre – Britrock, heavy maiden, gang rap, brakebeat. And I came to a startling but unshakeable conclusion: no genuinely good music has been created since 1988.

The top landing of any Bedford Park building’s stairwell felt so much safer. Lying there, flat on a bed of marble, using my backpack for a pillow, whole lives played out beneath me: the smell of food cooking; lovers’ arguments; dishes clanking; TVs blasting at top volume; my old shows, The Simpsons and Jeopardy!; rap music—all carrying me back to University Avenue. Mostly, though, I heard families: children calling out for mothers, husbands speaking their wives’ names, sending me reminders of the way love stretched between a handful of people fills a space, transforms it into a home.

Excuse my charisma, vodka with a spritzer. Swagger down pat, call my shit Patricia. Young Money militia and I am the commissioner. You don't want start Weezy 'cause the F is for finisher So misunderstood but what's a world without enigma?

Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole.

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.

Ravi, you big massive racist. Rap is the music of revolution. Rap is the reason we have rights.

The driver turned up a rap tune. Loud. With more bass than a barrage of howitzers. Something by 50 Cent. Or Two-Bits. Shiny Penny. What the hell did I know about rap music?

Fox-Trot By the stream the fox and she-fox stood Nose to nose beneath the stars Dancing the music of the woods. The deer rapped a beat with their hooves, The ravens sang from raven hearts As by the stream the fox and she-fox stood. The great owl called as a great owl would, The squirrels all shimmied in the dark, Dancing the music of the woods. Then from the north a fierce wind blew And broke the starry dance apart By the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.

Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion.

I put my hand to my chest in mock surprise. “Goodness me! DuBois appears to be black! I’m surprised you allowed it! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk of rap music and basketball?

Now let me ask you all a question, what's more pathetic and sad to you? A bunch of poor black people who listen to rich black rappers rapping about their wealth, or a bunch of poor white people who listen to rich white country singers singing songs about how much they love being broke rednecks?

Christopher turned the volume up on the MP3 player strapped to his arm and ran to the beat of his Spotify playlist. Adele was the next artist to shuffle on and he wondered why all killers depicted in television dramas only ever listened to angry, shouty, heavy metal music—in the same way that all fictitious black criminals only ever listened to rap. Nobody ever killed or robbed a bank to the sounds of Rihanna or Justin Bieber.

And so it can be said that rap became political when the people making it needed it to be fed, and it became dangerous when those people being fed realized they had the power to feed themselves forever off the power they had.

My conception of New York City came from rap music. I envisioned it as a place where people shot each other on the street and got away with it; no one walked on the streets, rather people drove in their sports cars looking for nightclubs and for violence.

The music is meant to be provocative—which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it’s dense with multiple meanings. Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don’t necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head. You can enjoy a song that knocks in the club or has witty punch lines the first time you hear it. But great rap retains mystery. It leaves shit rattling around in your head that won’t make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you.

I also realized I was right to trust my instincts. No matter how silly you feel or uncool you look, no matter how small that voice inside you is, that voice telling you something isn’t right: listen to it. [After the incident with guys inviting them to a party where Ari got rapped and Viv had gone home because the party didn’t feel right].

The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing more together than they could do apart. It's been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it's built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it's the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other sounds are on the track, even if it's a Timbaland production with all kinds of offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat measure by four-beat measure. It's like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops. When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat is only one half of a rap song's rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow cops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn't like time, it's like life. It's like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If 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. Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least, live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style - the relentlessness, the swagger, the complex wordplay - and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home.

But he played music so loudly he could not hear his pain. He stunted his growth beneath a bass that decorated his aura and lyrics that hardened the glass parts of him. He was indeed an autumn leaf dipped in concrete. He wanted sound, any sound but his own thoughts. Ears that needed songs louder than the mind were ears afraid of what they might hear inside.

Young people are experts on leisure, water skiing, dancing, rock music, rapping, TV watching . . . by and large, chores are a thing of the past.

Not afraid to die , but not the fear of death

There is no such thing as Christian rap and secular rap. Only people can become Christians. Music can't accept Jesus into its heart. So I am not trying to make Christian music or secular music. I'm just making music. Hip-hop, like all music, is a good thing. I could use it for evil by filling it with violence and misogyny and profanity. Or I can use it to glorify God.

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music—one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists— for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have.

Just as the body is shaped for movement, the mind is shaped for poetry. Rhythm and rhyme aid recall. Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in twentieth-century classical music – atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness – so Modernism re-branded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea-towels, not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet. It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap, and the rise of performance poetry, has been part of that return.

Your pussy is a fruit that I wanna juice Your pussy is a fruit that I wanna juice, yeah Put the molly in the booty, girl, we turning up tonight Cos that pussy is a smoothie it know how to do me right.

Sergeant Pepper was dead. G.I. Joe lived on. George Bush was president, movies stars were dying from AIDS, kids were smoking crack in the ghettos and the suburbs, Muslims were blowing airliners from the skies, rap music ruled, and nobody cared much about the Movement anymore. It was a dry and dusty thing, like the air in the graves of Hendrix, Joplin, and God. She was letting her thoughts take her into treacherous territory, and the thoughts threatened her smiley face. She stopped thinking about the dead heroes, the burning breed who made the bombs full of roofing nails and planted them in corporate boardrooms and National Guard Armories. She stopped thinking before the awful sadness crushed her. The sixties were dead. The survivors limped on, growing suits and neckties and potbellies, going bald and telling their children not to listen to that satanic heavy metal. The clock of the Age of Aquarius had turned, hippies and yippies had become preppies and yuppies. The Chicago Seven were old men. The Black Panthers had turned gray. The Grateful Dead were on MTV, and the Airplane had become a Top-40 Starship. Mary Terror closed her eyes, and thought she heard the noise of wind whistling through the ruins.

He’s taken courses on things like animal tracking, making a fire with a bow drill, building survival shelters in the forest. Now, my being an Indian, you might imagine I would know about all that stuff. But most Indian kids, even those on the rez, are not learning those things anymore. They’re too busy doing all the things other kids do—watching DVDs, playing Xbox games, and downloading rap music on their iPods.

Rap was always a pipe dream for me, but rap was all I had. Because really, what was I going to do with my life? I had a young daughter. Kim and I were always either getting evicted or our house was getting shot up or robbed.

Don't even get me started on The Beastie Boys—those Three Stooges of rap. They are The Triple Sam Bankman-Fried of the music industry, looting everything of value for their personal gain and leaving those behind far poorer for the experience.

He was a nuanced mosaic of varied influences, pulling into one body the lush humility of southern rap stalwarts like OutKast and Goodie Mob, the lyrical dexterity of Nas and Eminem, and the straight-ahead tough talk of Pusha T and Killer Mike.

Connie goes off the charts and into a whole new realm of music. Suddenly channeling Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s scary voice and skyrocketing to a new level of coolness, Connie raps an all-new ghetto version of the once-tepid theme song to Follow the Boys,

Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths.

he wondered why all killers depicted in television dramas only ever listened to angry, shouty, heavy metal music—in the same way that all fictitious black criminals only ever listened to rap. Nobody ever killed or robbed a bank to the sounds of Rihanna or Justin Bieber.

After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit—Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex

He was, after all, Darrow’s rock star, its heartthrob-musical-genius-Shakespeare, the boy who made spontaneous rapping, poetry, and wearing tweed caps cool (all small miracles unto themselves)—the kid everyone loved, longed for, yet simultaneously wished dead. He had it. An energy force field.

Music is reflection of self We just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail It's fucked up, ain't it? How we can come from practically nothin To bein able to have any f*ckin thing that we wanted That's why we sing for these kids who don't have a thing Except for a dream and a f*ckin rap magazine Who post pin-up pictures on they walls all day long Idolize they favorite rappers and know all they songs Or for anyone who's ever been through shit in they lives So they sit and they cry, at night, wishin they'd die Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe We're nothin to you, but we're the f*ckin sh*t in they eyes That's why we seize the moment Try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it Cause we consider these minutes golden And maybe they'll admit it when we're gone Just let our spirits live on Through our lyrics that you hear in our songs, and we can…

There was a rap on the common room door and every Ravenclaw froze. From the other side, Harry heard the soft, musical voice that issued from the eagle door knocker: “Where do Vanished objects go?” “I dunno, do I? Shut it!” snarled an uncouth voice that Harry knew was that of the Carrow brother, Amycus. “Alecto? Alecto? Are you there? Have you got him? Open the door!

Serpents and spiders, tail of a rat…call in the spirits, wherever they’re at! Rap on a table, it’s time to respond…send us a message from somewhere beyond! Goblins and ghoulies from last Hallowe’en…awaken the spirits with your tambourine! Creepies and crawlies, toads in a pond…let there be music, from regions beyond! Wizards and witches, wherever you dwell…give us a hint, by ringing a bell!

When he was barely 14, he auditioned on one of the most prestigious reality shows in South Korea, known as Superstar K. A show designed to find raw talent in the Korean music industry. The show achieved just that with the discovery of Jungkook. Interestingly, Jungkook did not win the show; neither was he part of the individuals who were selected. But his difference was evident to most of the individuals in the room, and before the show was over, he had received more than seven offers from seven different entertainment companies. The decision he made appeared to be the best decision he made all his life. He chose Big Hit Entertainment and started a 36-month training program with them.  Years later, he was quoted to have said that his present bandmate, Rap Monster, in the label was what influenced his decision.

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that…well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-. It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own….And the exported popular arts! The singing and dancing!…each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.

We listen to rap lyrics, but few study the history. One of the most significant contributions of hip hop. It offers a profound social commentary on the black experience. This is an aspect of the music that is overlooked because most people choose to pay more attention to “the hook” (the catchy repetitive phrase) than the complete body of work. In doing so, the listener misses the message: the essence of the music, the breakdown of the bars. That’s tantamount to someone who is able to quote scripture, but has never read the bible.

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a "teleplastic" mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. ("The Vane Sisters")

As a general observation, I think our high school and college-age students are wonderful, that they’re striving collectively, I think, to be as fine a generation of young people as we have ever had in this Church. But even as I say that, I am quick to acknowledge--and I don’t want to minimize that compliment, but I am quick to acknowledge what you already know--that exceptions to that rule are too many and often far too serious. When our youth sin now, they can do so in such flagrantly offensive ways with ever more serious consequences in their lives. That is the world we are in and it is, by scriptural definition, a world that is getting progressively more wicked. So over time we will continue to see a steady deterioration of what is acceptable in movies, on television, in pop music (which, in the case of rap lyrics, isn’t even music at all), and, perhaps in our most dangerous contemporary foe, abuse of the Internet. I have learned what you have learned--that the door to permissiveness, the door to promiscuity and lewdness, swings only one way. It only opens farther and farther; it never swings back. Individuals can choose to close it, but it is quite certain, historically speaking, that public appetite and public policy will never close it.

The great ones, however, never get lost in those distractions. Biggie in particular was legendary for his ability to stay focused. There could be all sorts of things going on—drinks being passed, blunts being rolled, people trying to holler at him about various projects—but he’d just sit in a chair with his eyes closed, seemingly oblivious to all the chaos around him. That was his way of connecting to the stillness inside of him, so that when it was time to get behind the microphone, he wasn’t caught up in worrying about how his last record did or how this one might be received once it was released. No, when it was time to make a song, he was always able to connect with both the music he was hearing in his headphones and the poetry that was filling up his heart. The same way today artists like Jay Z or Lil Wayne are able to create entire songs without ever putting a word down on paper. Through being able to connect completely with the music, they are able to operate from that “zone” that the great ones are able to access. That might not sound like a big deal, but I’ve seen so many artists get sidetracked by those distractions. And when it’s time for them to get in the recording booth and execute their craft, their mind is somewhere else. Sure, they’re rapping along to the beat, but they’re not connected to it.

The rain rapped the roof like mallets. The thunder was a tympani drum. Downstairs the raiders set fire to the refectory and the flames crackled like a hundred castanets. Those few who had not fled the church were screaming, high, pleading shrieks, met by lower barking orders of those committing the atrocities. The low and high voices, the crackling fire, whipping wind, drumming rain and crashing thunder created an angry symphony, swirling to a crescendo, and just as the invaders threw open the tomb of Saint Pascual, ready to desecrate his bones, the bells above the basilica began to chime, causing all to look up. At that precise moment, Frankie Presto was born.

We're still going to Loggerhead this afternoon, right?” Hi glanced around, then dropped his voice. “For that...home movie thing?” I nodded. “We might as well deal with what we can. Let's take the afternoon shuttle. I'll think of an excuse for Kit, thought I'm open to suggestions.” “Ben?” Shelton asked. “Not today. I think the two of us need a little distance.” The bell rang. We gathered our things and headed for the door. “Tell Kit we're cutting a music video,” Hi suggested as we walked. “Something real gangster, so we need to smash-cut our dance routines. Lay down some visuals. We could offer to let him rap over the second verse.” I gave him a thumbs-up. “Foolproof. Anyone need a locker stop?

That's why we sing for these kids who don't have a thing, except for a dream and a fuckin rap magazine; Who post pin-up pictures on they walls all day long, idolize they favorite rappers and know all they songs; Or for anyone who's ever been through shit in they lives, so they sit and they cry, at night, wishin they'd die; Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe; We're nothin to you, but we're the fuckin shit in they eyes; That's why we seize the moment; Try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it, cause we consider these minutes golden; And maybe they'll admit it when we're gone; Just let our spirits live on, through our lyrics that you hear in our songs... [Sing for the Moment]

This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts.” - Eminem “Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful.” - Guru (Gang Starr) “You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead.” - Mary J. Blige “Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!” - K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci) “The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine.” - Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk) “You didn’t wear your glasses and you haven’t carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?” - Bushwick Bill “Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep ‘yo balance.” - Erykah Badu “Can I see that pen?” - Bobby Brown “What else do you want to know? Talk to me.” - Aaliyah

Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that “there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” but we need education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel.” A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

He’d mentioned it a month before. A month. Not a good month, admittedly, but still—a month. That was enough time for him to have written something, at least. There was still something of him, or by him at least, floating around out there. I needed it. “I’m gonna go to his house,” I told Isaac. I hurried out to the minivan and hauled the oxygen cart up and into the passenger seat. I started the car. A hip-hop beat blared from the stereo, and as I reached to change the radio station, someone started rapping. In Swedish. I swiveled around and screamed when I saw Peter Van Houten sitting in the backseat. “I apologize for alarming you,” Peter Van Houten said over the rapping. He was still wearing the funeral suit, almost a week later. He smelled like he was sweating alcohol. “You’re welcome to keep the CD,” he said. “It’s Snook, one of the major Swedish—” “Ah ah ah ah GET OUT OF MY CAR.” I turned off the stereo. “It’s your mother’s car, as I understand it,” he said. “Also, it wasn’t locked.” “Oh, my God! Get out of the car or I’ll call nine-one-one. Dude, what is your problem?” “If only there were just one,” he mused. “I am here simply to apologize. You were correct in noting earlier that I am a pathetic little man, dependent upon alcohol. I had one acquaintance who only spent time with me because I paid her to do so—worse, still, she has since quit, leaving me the rare soul who cannot acquire companionship even through bribery. It is all true, Hazel. All that and more.” “Okay,” I said. It would have been a more moving speech had he not slurred his words. “You remind me of Anna.” “I remind a lot of people of a lot of people,” I answered. “I really have to go.” “So drive,” he said. “Get out.” “No. You remind me of Anna,” he said again. After a second, I put the car in reverse and backed out. I couldn’t make him leave, and I didn’t have to. I’d drive to Gus’s house, and Gus’s parents would make him leave. “You are, of course, familiar,” Van Houten said, “with Antonietta Meo.” “Yeah, no,” I said. I turned on the stereo, and the Swedish hip-hop blared, but Van Houten yelled over it. “She may soon be the youngest nonmartyr saint ever beatified by the Catholic Church. She had the same cancer that Mr. Waters had, osteosarcoma. They removed her right leg. The pain was excruciating. As Antonietta Meo lay dying at the ripened age of six from this agonizing cancer, she told her father, ‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?” I wasn’t looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. “No,” I shouted over the music. “That’s bullshit.” “But don’t you wish it were true!” he cried back. I cut the music. “I’m sorry I ruined your trip. You were too young. You were—” He broke down. As if he had a right to cry over Gus. Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late lamentation on his wall. “You didn’t ruin our trip, you self-important bastard. We had an awesome trip.” “I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I considered the honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t speak to me in Amsterdam except to ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and Augustus; his aching question about the relationship between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man who’d been drunk for years.

To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.

Parents need to awaken to the fact that some of today’s trendy tunes on the pop charts include lyrics that glamourize illicit drug usage, encourage demoralizing sexual activity, and blaspheme God. It was difficult enough for me to read the lyrics to some of these songs in my research for this book, much less think about what they represent and how they mock godly principles. “Just harmless music,” you say; “another form of artful expression.” After all, “no one bothers listening to the words anyway; they’re just interested in the beat . . . right?” Think on this disturbing story: A twenty-nine-year-old man confessed to police that he sang songs while fatally stabbing his wife and daughter. His four-year-old son survived the attack despite being stabbed eleven times. According to police, the husband and father said he was possessed and believed that his wife was a demon. (Note: It is not possible for a human being to become a demon, but one can be controlled by demonic forces.) The man reportedly told the police that just before stabbing his wife, he started screaming lyrics from a popular rap song, saying, “Here comes Satan. I’m the anti-Christ; I’m going to kill you.” Police said this father admitted that when the kids awoke to their mother’s screams, he stabbed them too. He said he stabbed his son the most because he loved him the most. Then he rolled a cigarette, said another prayer, and called 911.14

Sitting with some of the other members of the Scholastic Decathlon team, quiet, studious Martha Cox heard snatches of the lunchtime poetry. Her ears instantly pricked up. "What's going on?" she asked, her eyes bright. Betty Hong closed her book and leaned close. "Taylor McKessie told me all about it," she whispered. Betty told Martha about next week's poetry-reading assembly and how Taylor was trying to help half the starting basketball team locate their muse. "That's totally fresh!" Martha cried. "Too bad I'm not in Ms Barrington's English class." Betty made a face. "You like poetry stuff? I thought you were into maths and science." "I like it all," Martha replied. "I love astronomy and hip-hop-" Betty rolled her eyes. "Not hip-hop again." "Word, girl," Martha replied. "You know I've been bustin' out kickin' rhymes for years. It helps me remember lessons, like last night's astronomy lecture." "No," Betty said. "You didn't make up a rap to that." "Just watch," Martha cried. Leaping out of her chair, she began to chant, freestyle: "At the centre of our system is the molten sun, A star that burns hot, Fahrenheit two billion and one. But the sun, he ain't alone in the heavenly sphere, He's got nine homeys in orbit, some far, some near. Old Mercury's crowding in 'bout as close as he can, Yo, Merc's a tiny planet who loves a tan.... Some kids around Martha heard her rap. They really got into it, jumping up from their tables to clap and dance. The beat was contagious. Martha started bustin' some moves herself. She kept the rap flowing, and more kids joined the party.... "Venus is next. She's a real hot planet, Shrouded by clouds, hot enough to melt granite. Earth is the third planet from the sun, Just enough light and heat to make living fun. Then comes Mars, a planet funky and red. Covered with sand, the place is pretty dead. Jupiter's huge! The largest planet of all! Saturn's big, too, but Uranus is small. So far away, the place is almost forgotten, Neptune's view of Earth is pretty rotten. And last but not least, Pluto's in a fog, Far away and named after Mickey's home dog. Yo, that's all the planets orbiting our sun, But the Milky Way galaxy is far from done!" When Martha finished her freestyle, hip-hop flow, the entire cafeteria burst into wild applause. Troy, Chad, Zeke, and Jason had been clapping and dancing, too. Now they joined in the whooping and hollering. "Whoa," said Chad. "Martha's awesome.

The heart of rock will always remain a primal world of action. The music revives itself over and over again in that form, primitive rockabilly, punk, hard soul and early rap. Integrating the world of thought and reflection with the world of primitive action is *not* a necessary skill for making great rock 'n' roll. Many of the music's most glorious moments feel as though they were birthed in an explosion of raw talent and creative instinct (some of them even were!). But ... if you want to burn bright, hard *and* long, you will need to depend on more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you *farther* when things get dicey. That's what'll help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of rock's artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years, make more than a few great albums and avoid treading water, or worse, I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities, fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion and an inbred entitlement, all slammed over a world of fear, hunger and insecurity. That's a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make, or resistant to making, the lead of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you'd better have a plan, for some preparedness and personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen minutes. Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there *is* something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and *here*. I'll take Dylan; the pirate raiding party of the Stones; the hope-I-get-very-old-before-I-die, present live power of the Who; a fat, still-mesmerizing-until-his-death Brando—they all suit me over the alternative. I would've liked to have seen that last Michael Jackson show, a seventy-year-old Elvis reinventing and relishing in his talents, where Jimi Hendrix might've next taken the electric guitar, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others whose untimely deaths and lost talents stole something from the music I love, living on, enjoying the blessings of their gifts and their audience's regard. Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways. Plus, to those you've received so much from, so much joy, knowledge and inspiration, you wish life, happiness and peace. These aren't easy to come by.

The music on the radio--pop, rock, rap, and country songs which promote class war and celebrate idiocy, sociopathy, immoral wealth accumulation, discrimination, and stultifying social roles--is the thrown voice of Wall Street. All of the broker's values are exemplified in this music. ...The elite seek to program, dupe, hypnotize, control you--who they regard as their property, their 'bitch'--through these proxy singers. ...Don't let them talk to you that way.

turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit—Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar. This was the song “Rollin’,” judging by the fact that the chorus was Fred saying that word several dozen times. Perfect. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . .

Never Let Me Down" (feat. Jay-Z, J-Ivy) [Intro:] Yeah Grandmama Told you I won't let you down Told you I won't let this rap game change me, right? [Chorus:] When it comes to being true, at least true to me One thing I found,one thing I found Oh no you'll neva let me down, Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) Get up I get(down) [Jay-Z:] Yo, yo first I snatched the street then I snatched the charts, First had they ear now I hav they're heart, Rappers came and went, I've been hear from the start, Seen them put it together Watch them take it apart, See the Rovers roll up wit ribbons I've seen them re-poed, re-sold and re-driven So when I reload, he holds #1 position When u hot I'm hot And when your feet cold, mines is sizzelin It's plain to see Nigga's can't f*** wit me Cuz ima be that nigga fo life This is not an image This is God given This is hard liven Mixed wit crystal sipping It's the most consistent Hov Give you the most hits you can fit inside a whole disc and Nigga I'm home on these charts, y'all niggaz visitin It's Hov tradition, Jeff Gordan of rap I'm back to claim pole position, holla at ya boy [Chorus] [Kanye West:] I get down for my grandfather who took my momma Made her sit that seat where white folks ain't wanna us to eat At the tender age of 6 she was arrested for the sit in With that in my blood I was born to be different Now niggas can't make it to ballots to choose leadership But we can make it to Jacob and to the dealership That's why I hear new music And I just don't be feeling it Racism still alive they just be concealing it But I know they don't want me in the damn club They even made me show I.D to get inside of Sam's club I did dirt and went to church to get my hands scrubbed Swear I've been baptised at least 3 or 4 times But in the land where nigga's praise Yukons and getting paid It gon' take a lot more than coupons to get us saved Like it take a lot more than do-rags to get your waves Noting sadder than that day my girl father past away So I promised to Mr Rany I'm gonna marry your daughter And u know I gotta thank u for they way that she was brought up And I know that u were smiling when u see that car I bought her And u sent tears from heaven when u seen my car get balled up But I can't complaint what the accident did to my Left Eye Cuz look what a accident did to Left Eye First Aaliyah and now romeo must die I know a got angels watching me from the other side

Don’t like me or dislike me because I’m from Texas, like me or dislike me because of the music I make and the way I rap and what I rap about and how I bring it. And if you can’t appreciate me for that, then I can’t help you. I’m not interested in being the best in the South. I’m interested in being the best.

I’ve always known why we were making the music we were making, just like I know how a lifetime of subtle and blatant racism and oppression can make you want to reach for your pistol and either shoot the oppressor or shoot yourself. When you live in a society that repeatedly tells you that it values a white person’s life, safety, values, and lifestyle more than your own, and you get reminders of it every day and at every turn—whether it’s the Michael Brown case or just talking to a friend or family member about some fucked-up shit they just went through while living their life—it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that the best solution to all of this shit is violence.

Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap—drains the life from it.

There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what’s the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.

I’d hardly call four years rushing things. I love you and I think I know you better than anyone. I know your favorite food is sushi and that you hate rap music and all about your unhealthy obsession for Gerard Butler.” “Oooo, Gerard,” she teased.

When it comes to music and the general question of style, the only style God seems to be concerned with is lifestyle.

The gospel that is transcultural can be encultured into any culture—through nearly any area of human endeavor—as long we realize that no culture or subculture owns the gospel outright.

rap that dishonors God does not ruin all rap. God is redeeming rap.

When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core. The classic Ying Yang Twins song 'Salt Shaker'? It's amazing.

Not one civil rights group took up Cosby’s call for marches and protests against drug dealers, pregnant teens, deadbeat dads, and hate-filled rap music that celebrates violence.

As Adam and Masa drove away from WeWork’s headquarters, Masa pulled out an iPad and began sketching the terms of a deal: SoftBank and the Vision Fund would invest more than $4 billion into WeWork. The investment would be the Vision Fund’s biggest to date, and many times larger than any funding round Adam had managed thus far. Masa signed his name, drew another line next to it, and handed Neumann the stylus. Adam had gotten WeWork this far in large part by making shrewd deals—acting coy when it suited him and playing hardball when necessary. But that morning, Adam had met with a spiritual adviser, as he often did before making big decisions, and received some advice: in life, it was sometimes necessary to do “the opposite of our nature.” Adam also knew a good deal when he saw one. After Masa dropped him off, Neumann got into his white Maybach, which had been trailing Masa’s car, turned up some rap music, and drove back to WeWork headquarters. A photo of the digital napkin, with Masa’s signature in red and Adam’s in blue, was soon circulating among WeWork executives. The entire exchange, from Masa’s twelve-minute tour to signatures sealing one of the largest venture capital investments of all time, had taken less than half an hour.

complement the first. The initial credit line Junior offered for investing in artists was only $100 million, much less than what had been available at Warner, but Morris could see that, sitting on a limitless tap of booze money, there was a lot more where that came from.4 Best of all, Seagram was domiciled in Canada, where the lyrics of popular rap songs were not a pressing political issue. Although Jimmy Iovine and Doug Morris were temporarily estranged as colleagues, they remained best friends and hoped to reunite. Fuchs’ actions had stung them both, and Iovine had raised such a stink after Morris’ sacking that he was no longer permitted in the Time Warner Building. Under normal circumstances, he too would have been fired, but Iovine didn’t actually work for Warner directly—he was an equity partner in a joint venture, and the only way to get rid of him was to sell him back his shares. This was an expensive proposition, as Interscope had diversified beyond rap, signing No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Together, the two came up with a plan. Iovine, the agitator, would make himself unbearable to Fuchs, and push extreme albums like Dogg Food and Antichrist Superstar that made the provocations of The Chronic seem boring by comparison. Morris,