Rap Producer Quotes

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

It is not surprising that young white males – most between thirty and forty – play major roles in the production of hip-pop. It’s easy to forget this because when most people critique rap and hip-pop harshly, they assume that young black men are the sole creators and producers of misogynist rap. In fact, nothing is unilaterally produced anymore. As we’ve discussed, once you have a corporate takeover of the street culture, it is no longer the property of the young, Black and Latino men and women who have created it. It is reinvented with the mass consumer audience in mind. The hard-core misogyny and the hard-core sexism isn’t a translation from street to big-time studio, it is a product of the big-time studio.

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

April 1 Heartiness v. Heartlessness towards Others It is Christ . . . who also maketh intercession for us. . . . The Spirit . . . maketh intercession for the saints. Romans 8:34, 27 Do we need any more argument than this to become intercessors—that Christ “ever liveth to make intercession”; that the Holy Spirit “maketh intercession for the saints”? Are we living in such vital relationship to our fellow men that we do the work of intercession as the Spirit-taught children of God? Begin with the circumstances we are in—our homes, our business, our country, the present crisis as it touches us and others—are these things crushing us? Are they badgering us out of the presence of God and leaving us no time for worship? Then let us call a halt, and get into such living relationship with God that our relationship to others may be maintained on the line of intercession whereby God works His marvels. Beware of outstripping God by your very longing to do His will. We run ahead of Him in a thousand and one activities, consequently we get so burdened with persons and with difficulties that we do not worship God, we do not intercede. If once the burden and the pressure come upon us and we are not in the worshipping attitude, it will produce not only hardness toward God but despair in our own souls. God continually introduces us to people for whom we have no affinity, and unless we are worshipping God, the most natural thing to do is to treat them heartlessly, to give them a text like the jab of a spear, or leave them with a rapped-out counsel of God and go. A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to Our Lord. Are we in the direct line of the intercession of our Lord and of the Holy Spirit?

Usually we'd talk about stuff like why black people were able to produce the blues, jazz, hip-hop, and rap, but Zainichi couldn't create their own unique culture. But on this day, we talked about mindless trash-- like whether we would die for Kim Basinger, whether Ringo would be the obvious choice if we had to fire one of the Beatles, and whether Superman's piston action would be really super-- and laughed our heads off.

For every video that swiftly satuated the internet-I'd mom-danced with Jimmy Fallon, Nerf-dunked on LeBron James, and college-rapped with Jay Pharoah- we'd focused ourselves on doing more than trending for a few hours on Twitter. And we had results. Forty-five million kids were eating healthier breakfasts and lunches; eleven million students were getting sixty minutes of physical activity every day through our Let's Move! Active Schools Program. Children were overall eating more whole grains and produce. The era of supersized fast food was coming to a close.

willing to close large distances in response to calls. Does that make them stupid? No! Due to the vastness of the landscape these birds often call home, it’s not uncommon for a walk-about tom to respond and come to a live-hen call that barely tickles his eardrums. When calling Merriam’s birds, I prefer to run calls that carry great distances and cut the all-to-often howling western wind. My favorite reach-out-and-touch-their-ears Merriam’s call is a trusty box call. Box calls get a bad rap. When I give seminars, I hear a lot of negative comments about them. They’re too easy to use. Every hunter on the planet hammers away on them. They don’t work on public land. You can’t get the exact pitch you want. I could go on forever with the complaints I’ve heard from hunters about box calls. Here’s my opinion on the matter. They work great to cut the western winds. They also work great when trying to raise the interest of a distant tom. On multiple occasions, I’ve been able to sit behind a quality spotting scope and watch a tom 500 yards away take notice of my box call. Once you master them, box calls can produce pitch-perfect tones. I especially feel this is the case when using a true chalk-on-wood system. Another Merriam’s eardrum ringer is an aluminum pot-and-peg call. I’ve found aluminum pot calls carry great distances. I’m also a fan of glass. What I love about pot-and-peg calls is that I can easily adjust the volume and pitch simply by swapping strikers. And that’s not all. Once you really know what you’re doing, these calls produce, in my opinion, simply the best turkey tones. Like many turkey fanatics, my go-to call is a diaphragm. Through this wonderful

Hip-hop has always been about style and self-expression, but it feels like as the culture’s gotten older, that’s somehow been lost. You’ve got all of these guys out here now just trying to transform into whatever’s hot to chase some dollars and some airplay, but if you’re chasing the next man, who the fuck are you really? You get it on the production end, too, but if you ask me, that’s not being a producer or an MC, that’s being a chameleon. It’s biting, straight up. I don’t get it. It’s fucking up the culture. That shit used to get you clowned out of the game.

Q-Tip (who produced “One Love”) says, reflecting on the importance of Illmatic. “You had rap before Rakim, like, you could do Rakim A.D., you know what I’m saying? There was rap before Rakim and rap after Rakim. So he’s like, when it comes to lyricism and when it comes to influence, if you’re drawing that analogy, he’s like Elvis, you know what I’m saying? And in terms of the innovation of what he did, Nas is like Dylan.

But when I landed in college, I noticed what looked like a gleaming. A goofy, doofy, curly-haired man with broad shoulders brushed by me in the hallway one day. He smelled like cinnamon. He had teddy-brown eyes and performed in the college’s improv group. He was the best one by far, made big gestures, made jokes from a place of kindness and whimsy, pulled ripples of laughter out of this cold, hard world. I used to sit in the audience and marvel. He seemed like an impossibility. It took years. Years of slowly befriending him through mutual friends. Years of calling into his late-night, freestyle-rap radio show, daring my tongue to try… to rhyme on the fly! I even joined the improv group. And eventually, one night I told him how I felt and instead of flinching away, as I had assumed he would, as the boys in the hallway had made it seem that he would, he kissed me. After graduating college, we moved in together, to a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a red Formica table and a great front stoop. I finagled my way into a job helping produce a radio program all about science and wonder. He was continuing with comedy—stand-up and improv and writing—and working as a yellow-cab driver to support himself. We stayed up late into the night, sipping beers on the stoop, talking about our days, turning awkward moments and missteps into jokes. I felt like I had found the thing I had thought could never exist. Refuge. It smelled like cinnamon and its walls were made of bad puns and cheap rhymes, piling higher and higher against the chill of the world. My head became full of visions for the future. The TV shows we would write, the tree houses we would build, the way the grass would curl between our toes as we chased our kids through the yard. Until, seven years into it, I toppled the whole thing. Late one night on a beach five hundred miles away from him, possessed by moonlight and red wine and the smell of a bonfire, I reached out for the bouncing blond girl I had been trying not to eye all night. She was wet from swimming; she was prickled in goose bumps, hundreds of goose bumps, that I wanted to press flat with my tongue. She smiled as I placed my hand on her waist, as I touched my lips to her neck. The stars wrapped around us. Her steam became mine. When I told the curly-haired man what I had done, he told me it was over.

European converts to Islam were more vulnerable to extremist groups because many lacked this lifelong socialization. Many came from deprived social backgrounds and were primed to be drawn to aggressive, militant strains of anything, from local gangs to local extremist ideologues. They were quick to subsume their personal grudges against family and society into transnational political grudges against the West. Cuspert fell readily into the arms of shadowy German jihadist figures who promised that extreme stance. In fact, Cuspert didn't convert to Islam so much as initiate himself straight into a radical Islamist group called The True Religion. It was as though he had pressed a button and changed the aesthetic theme of the WordPress site of his life from gangsta to mujahid; the chaotic structure and violent impulses were all the same, but were now overlaid with Islamist imagery and themes. Suddenly causes like Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan mattered to him deeply, and Germans, Westerners, and a broad swath of humanity became "unbelievers" who were complicit in Muslim suffering. His old friends on the Berlin rap scene were devastated, and furious. They were from "good enough" Muslim families and were adept at living and rapping about the painful contradictions. They didn't turn to violence. They all knew where the lines were. His record producer later complained bitterly about Cuspert's betrayal: "He disgraced everyone, all of the Muslim MCs. He ruined the community. May Allah forgive him. But we don't.

Many of the Fox family’s close friends were discovering their own gift for mediumship. Isaac Post found that if he entered a trance, he was guided by the spirits to write down their messages. In 1851, the year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in serial form and Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Melville’s Moby Dick were published, Isaac compiled messages from William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and others into a three-hundred-page volume called Voices from the Spirit World; Being Communications From Many Spirits by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. The messages, Isaac said, had been transcribed through automatic writing that sometimes occurred in the presence of “A.L. Fish (a rapping medium).” In 1852 Charles Hammond, the Universalist minister who had watched in awe as the furniture danced and floated in front of him at one of the sisters’ early seances, produced a book called Light from the Spirit World; The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine, and Others, to the Seventh Circle in the Spirit World.

In his first class of the day, correlated language arts, a class for students at least two years below their grade level in English, Boobie Miles spent the period working on a short research paper that he called “The Wonderful Life of Zebras.” He thumbed through various basic encyclopedia entries on the zebra. He ogled at how fast they ran (“Damn, they travel thirty miles”) and was so captivated by a picture of a zebra giving birth that he showed it to a classmate (“Want to see it have a baby, man?”). By the end of the class, Boobie produced the following thesis paragraph: Zebras are one of the most unusual animals in the world today. The zebra has many different kind in it nature. The habitat of the zebra is in wide open plain. Many zebras have viris types of relatives. He then went on to algebra I, a course that the average college-bound student took in ninth grade and some took in eighth. Because of his status as a special needs student, Boobie hadn’t taken the course until his senior year. He was having difficulty with it and his average midway through the fall was 71. After lunch it was on to creative writing, where Boobie spent a few minutes playing with a purple plastic gargoyle-looking monster. He lifted the fingers of the monster so it could pick its nose, then stuck his own fingers into its mouth. There were five minutes of instruction that day; students spent the remaining fifty-odd minutes working on various stories they were writing. They pretty much could do what they wanted. Boobie wrote a little and also explained to two blond-haired girls what some rap terms meant, that “chillin’ to the strength,” for example, meant “like cool to the max.” Boobie enjoyed this class. It gave him an unfettered opportunity to express himself, and the teacher didn’t expect much from him. His whole purpose in life, she felt, was to be a football player. “That’s the only thing kids like that have going for them, is that physical strength,” she said.