Conscious Rap Quotes & Sayings

We have to remember examples of many artists of conscious rap who have been coopted by the Department of State of the United States to be cultural ambassadors in different parts of the world, like Syria, like other parts of the Middle East, including conscious Islamic-American rappers that are representing an international political agenda for the United States through cultures more affable for people of color in other parts of the world. — Bocafloja

It's not that you don't make any money doing conscious rap music. You make a lot of money doing this, but if you're greedy and you're not satisfied with $500,000 a year, and you want $2 million a year, then you will suffer as a conscious rap artist. — KRS-One

Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life — Parker J. Palmer

We should remember what a rapper like Tupac Shakur was doing, to a certain degree, who came from an experience of politicization very close to being a "Panther Baby". He knew, he came from that experience of the Black Panthers, and accounting for all his contradictions and process of growth, he achieved politically through gangsta rap things that no conscious rapper has achieved, such as establishing political, ethical, and moral codes between Crips and Bloods in the United States. — Bocafloja

My sister Suga Tee is doing conscious rap. She speaks to the youth. She has an album coming out soon. She got saved but she is still doing her thing. She still spits good game. She's talented. She sings. I don't know if a lot of people know this but Suga Tee has a beautiful voice. So ya'll look out for her album you dig? And look forward to a future Clique album. — E-40

If you're true to the upliftment of people and the unity of people, raising the self-worth of people, then you live within your means. But the problem is that we're looking at the grass on the other side, saying, "That's greener. I want to be in the thug market, but I want to be a conscious rap artist." It doesn't work like that. — KRS-One

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride. — David Foster Wallace

For so-called conscious rappers, it is an opportunity to rap about ways to educate others about African American history, politics and even relationships: all of which would be missed if society merely focused on the "hook" and ignored the influence. — Carlos Wallace

Truth had me up against the ropes
And semi-conscious without no boxing skills. — Pharoahe Monch

I look at WorldstarHipHop in the morning, Bossip, Global Grind, and everything in between, but it's all so quick, I don't even think about it. And I've never been a fan of lyrical or socially conscious rap music. — Harmony Korine

I never liked socially conscious rap. I like rap that's physical, that's about a beat and bass and repetition. — Harmony Korine

I've been called everything. Gangsta rap. I've been called conscious rap. You know, everything. Whoever feels like calling it whatever they want to call it, that's on them. — Nas

We can actually live out the trials and temptations of the day before they come. We can in prayer deal with all our unrighteous aspirations, selfishness, perverse inclinations, impatience, anger, procrastination. This is a form of spiritual creation. — Stephen Covey

In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. — H.P. Lovecraft

If you're a conscious rap artist and you're worried about Billboard charts, you're gonna have a problem. — KRS-One

There is beauty within each one of us. It just takes the right person to spot it. — Faraaz Kazi

As a conscious rap artist, you should not want to be in a gangster market. You should be trying to establish your own market, create a place where you can be yourself and make some money and feed your family. — KRS-One

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music." — Jess Row

I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny - arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate - I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom - maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions. — David Grossman

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant. — Stephen Jay Gould

Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self. — Paul Tillich

We used to have MTV and all these ways we can show our videos, and it was these rap shows, and it was everything. And then it became not cool to be conscious; it became cool to just hang out. Escapism rap became the norm. And, when I say "escapism rap", I mean getting high, get your cars, get your money, get your jewelry, go to the club, have your women, and it just became all about escaping your reality and not making your reality better on a real tip; not just on the have fun tip. — Ice Cube

Blessed the one who continually humbles himself willingly; he will be crowned by the One who willingly humbled himself for our sake. — Ephrem The Syrian

I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I'm conscious of the mainstream without selling out. — J. Cole

All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The power of a man is like a bull's charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won't get you what you want. His words perplexed me. Wasn't power singular and simple? In the world that I knew, men just happened to have more of it. (I hoped to change this.) — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

That's one of my struggles as a hip-hop artist. If I feel like doing a super conscious song where I don't even rap. — SonReal

You can't expect to be on MTV and critique George Bush. You can't expect to be on BET or the cover of The Source advocating Jesus Christ or Buddha or Hindu Krishna or Moses. As a conscious rap artist, you have to play in the arena that you're supposed to be in. What is that arena? That arena is the college market. The conscious rap artist woos the college market, even though the college market is the wildest, most sexed-out, drug-driven market in the country, possibly the world. — KRS-One

I believe a lot in gangsta rap, I see in it a lot of positive things as it is. I believe it is only about doing politicization work. Revolutionary change will come from there, it won't come from conscious rap. — Bocafloja

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail. — Michael Eric Dyson

We have to remember that the experience of gangsta rap as such in its foundation is an anti-systemic experience primarily. And it is an anti-systemic experience that is not in some cases politicized, but in general results in a much more transgressive, much more uncomfortable music for the structures of power, than conscious rap or political rap. — Bocafloja