Quotes & Sayings About Hip Hop Life

The human body is the best work of art. — Jess C. Scott

Life without dreaming is a life without meaning. — Wale

Hip-hop - it's the safari: it allows people who aren't under those circumstances to come closer to inner-city life, to explore it without actually being in danger. It's something kids in middle America indulge in to be rebellious. — Curtis Jackson

I'm trap in marriage with gangsta rhyme and my street life. — Kjiva

I never let the worst things in life get the best of me.
So take these testes and, ummm ... open sesame. — King Sun

Life is something you can't borrow and give back;
Here today and gone tomorrow ... just like that. — E-40

In this life ain't no happy endings;
Only pure beginnings followed by years of sinning and fake repentance. — J. Cole

Most people have a blank slate and can start from nothing. But for me, I had to break a bad habit that I've been doing all of my life, which is freestyle hip-hop. — Roshon Fegan

There's a real self-serving element to hip-hop that threatens its life span. — John Mayer

Okay. Right. Horror meets romance meets erotica meets fantasy meets hip hop. Throw in some leather and some Miami Ink shit, stir with a baseball bat and a tire iron, sprinkle on some baby powder, and serve over a hot bed of Holy-Mary-mother-of-God-this-has-to-work-or-I'm-going-to-be-a-lawyer-for-the-rest-of-my-natural-life.
No problem."
(J.R. Ward on the elements of writing the Black Dagger Brotherhood) — J.R. Ward

My life is Avatar, your life is Precious. — Ras Kass

I never asked to be born, and death's no question.
The sun's still shining off the same old lessons,
Then why does life feel like an educated guess?
And my thoughts are like meals ... I'm a sucker for the seconds. — Amir Mohamed

I'm raised from gutter to protect another gutter — Kjiva

Rock is periodically pronounced dead by clear rock critics - killed by world music, or by hip-hop, or electronica, or the Backstreet Boys. But if you wait a year, it comes back to life. — Dean Wareham

The difference is that they [Europeans] don't have that culture about hip-hop as a lifestyle, a way of life; for them it's more of the new trend, the new music that you have to like. — K-Maro

I live this life at a pace that anyone can go.
Know your place, and dedicate your role
... To the faith that you'll die alone — Kendrick Lamar

With 'Hip-Hop Saved My Life,' I attempted to make 'Kick, Push,' but for rappers. To give a real basic play-by-play of the life of a rapper before he makes it - if he ever makes it, because you can get stuck in that and be trying to make it for the rest of your life. — Lupe Fiasco

Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop. — Mos Def

I've never had a dream in my life,
Because a dream is what you wanna do, but still haven't pursued.
I knew what I wanted, and did it till it was done.
So I've been the dream I wanted to be since Day One. — Aesop Rock

Hip-hop is a way of life. It isn't a genre in truth in 'American Idol.' — Nigel Lythgoe

All we want in this life is peace, prosperity and a little paper. — Q-Tip

Since hip hop emerged from the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has become an international, multi-billion-dollar phenomenon. It has grown to encompass more than just rap music. Hip hop has created a culture that incorporates ethnicity, art, politics, fashion, technology and urban life." This debunks the widely accepted argument that the genre is inherently divisive. With so many factors converging to create such an intricate, informative and multi-faceted genre, whose history and impact have bridged barriers between artist and society, it is not too complicated an endeavor to understand that its relevance repudiates its notorious reputation. — Carlos Wallace

But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop. — Talib Kweli

My partner, Danny Strong, came to me with this idea of telling a story about my life and merging that with music and the hip-hop world. He wrote 'The Butler' and originally wanted to do 'Empire' also as a movie. — Lee Daniels

Sunny days wouldn't be special, if it wasn't for rain. Joy wouldn't feel so good, if it wasn't for pain. Death gotta be easy, 'cause life is hard; It'll leave you physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred. — Curtis Jackson

I've been dancing my entire life. Jazz, hip hop, ballet. And then there's tap dancing. I love to tap. — Emily VanCamp

Life is love, heartache and strain,
Yet the strength to overcome it all keeps me sane. — O.C.

Hip hop has been an integral part of my life and my whole career. I started off doing videos with Ice Cube, and Dre, and Mary J. Blige, and TLC. So I've been involved in hip hop since the beginning. — F. Gary Gray

Everything will eventually come to an end,
So try to savor the moment, cause time flies, don't it?
The beauty of life, you gotta make it last for the better,
Cause nothin' lasts forever. — Nas

Life is a blast when you know what you're doin',
Best to know what you're doin' 'fore your life get ruined.
Life is a thrill when your skill is developed,
If you ain't got a skill or trade, then shut the hell up. — Del Tha Funkee Homosapien

Regardless of how it goes down, life goes on. — Rick Ross

We can't change the world until we change ourselves. — The Notorious B.I.G.

Someone put opera on inside the house. Someone changed it to hip-hop, thank God. Someone started a shower. Someone vacuumed. Again.
Life. In all its mundane majesty.
And you couldn't take advantage of it if you were sitting on your ass in the shadows ... whether it was in actuality, or metaphorically because you were trapped in an attic's darkness. — J.R. Ward

Reggae was always a passion of mine. I used to say in interviews that I would love to do a reggae album. But it consumed my life being a hip-hop artist and being Heavy D, which I'm happy and proud of. — Heavy D

When I was a kid, hip-hop had that effect on me, it was escape and it showed me a different way of life. — Mac Miller

The song, 'Life is Better,' is about hip-hop. It's about my love for hip-hop. And, you know, I go through all the artists from the beginning to the end, you know. And, well, not to the end, but since the beginning to now, you know. — Q-Tip

I turned forty this year. Forty! Which is so weird because I've always been young. I've been young my whole life, as a matter of fact. No matter how I dissect this, I've aged out of the "young" category and graduated to the "middle" group. My brain feels confused about this because I am so juvenile. I make up my own words to hip-hop songs and quote Paul Rudd as a parenting strategy. Surely I am a preteen. — Jen Hatmaker

Life is about perspective and I have a different perspective from most. I am not trying to be in Hip Hop at 43 and looking like an old man. I always enjoyed business and my independence. I am an Entrepreneur. — Damon Dash

No, I don't like you, I just thought you were cute enough to kiss you. — Frank Ocean

I grew up in Chicago, so hip-hop has always been a part of my life. — Gina Rodriguez

Eat from the Tree of Life and throw away the verbal ham. — Sadat X

Hip-hop is the only music in the world where you can take any instrument and make it hip hop. It's anybody's music. It's what you make of it. That's for anything you do in life. — Yelawolf

I really love hip hop. My cousin Nas came out with an album 'Life Is Good,' and I love that album, but I also love Maroon 5. — Yara Shahidi

It seems to me like all these people claim to be the victim,
Acting like the whole entire world is out to get them.
Stand up on your own,
And prove that you are grown,
Because the life that you save may be your own. — Lee Majors

Life is like a box of chocolates, you fill your body with toxins,
And amoxicillin and penicillin to cure your illness.
But in realness? These medical companies will get you monthly
Prescribing me pills that make me ill, just to comfort me. — Termanology

Music is a huge part of my life, I enjoy every genre of music from jazz to country, and I even get down with a bit of hip hop. — Nicole Richie

I think hip hop should be a living word. And what I mean by the living word is like yo, you gotta have the words that provide life. — Chuck D

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It's the only thing I've ever been even decent at. I don't know how to do anything else. — Eminem

Life is a b*tch depending how you dress her. — Kanye West

When I first started comedy, before I kind of gained any national prominence, I - in a weird way - went back to that. Marc Maron had me on WTF making fun of me about that when I first opened for him. I had this very kind of hip-hop bravado to me, and I realized that now I've let some of that go in my stage presence, that maybe that was because I had dropped that completely from my life, and when I got onstage I sort of rekindled it. And I think now that it was perhaps a defense mechanism that was left over from those days, which I think is kind of interesting. — Moshe Kasher

When you think of blues, all you think about is crying guitar like B.B. King's guitar. You think about someone crying that their woman's gone. And how bad life is and all that. Why can't it be something happy with the blues? Why can't it have a hip-hop beat to which you can do the dances of today? — Ike Turner

Life can change your directions, even when you ain't planned it.
All you can do is handle it, worst thing you can do is panic. — T.I.

Life is too short to live the same day twice. So each new day make sure you live your life. — Machine Gun Kelly

When you see the misogyny of hip-hop, it's so horrible, it's so putrid, it's so, you know, odious, that we know, we smell, we see it. The misogyny that is reified, that is reinforced, that is subtly reproduced in corporate America or in church life or in synagogues and temples and the like, is sometimes more subtly dealt with. — Michael Eric Dyson

When people treat you like nothing, you begin to feel like nothing. — Drake

You can be the ugliest man in the world but once you got money, you can have all the women in the world. — Jonathan Anthony Burkett

Hip-hop was a big part of my life growing up, especially West Coast gangster rap. The reason I was able to listen to it so freely was that my mom couldn't hear any of it, so we would be driving along just blaring Too $hort's horrible misogynistic stuff, and my mom would just turn to us and say, "This is great. I can feel the bass. It sounds so nice." And we're like, "Yeah, mom. We can feel the bass, too." — Moshe Kasher

Hip-hop definitely saved my life. Being able to write about the things I was doing, the things I was seein' and all that stuff, putting that on paper and coming into my own as Joell Ortiz. That's why I don't have a stage name, because I chose to talk about everything under the sun that happened to me or next to me in my music. — Joell Ortiz

For years, I wanted to know if there was one person, one voice, one individual inside me. All my life people would call me a chink or a chigger. I couldn't listen to hip-hop and be myself without people questioning my authenticity. Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. The white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow.
No black or Spanish person ever called me chigger, but hustling all of a sudden got white people off my back. I was the same dude with a different job, but now I was finally "authentic" to white people, and it made me realized it's all a trap. We can't fucking win. If I follow the rules and play the model minority, I'm a lapdog under a bamboo ceiling. If I like hip-hop because I see solidarity, I'm aping. But, if I throw it all away, shit on my parents, sell weed, pills, and strike fear into unsuspecting white boys with stunt Glocks, now I's authentic? Fuck you, America. (171) — Eddie Huang

Why should i expect yes cos everything i get no — Kjiva

Damn right I like the life I live,
Cause I went from negative to positive. — The Notorious B.I.G.

Stop lookin' at what you ain't got, and start being thankful for what you do got. — T.I.

We live in a society created by an empire
That's based on terror ... welcome to the One World Era,
A complete interruption to your lil' paltry-ass life,
That you thought you was livin, and what you been given. — Coolio

That's a trick question Peter. It's real-life. Master P is a thug. He's poppin' everybody. — Machine Gun Kelly

Hip hop was definitely, far and away, the primary influence for at least 10 years of my life. From about 7 or 8 on till about 15 or 16, that's all I listened to. — Alex Ebert

You've got to realize that the world's a test,
You can only do your best and let Him do the rest.
You've got your life, and got your health,
So quit procrastinating and push it yourself. — Cee Lo Green

Everything has a price ...
No matter if it's fortune, fame or your life.
I understood later that it's all about paper,
Everything has a fee in the land of the free. — O.C.

McDonald's offers a king's ransom to any hip-hop artist who is able to put Big Mac into a song. MTV - and more to the point, Viacom - is succeeding in extending a teenage life to twenty-nine or even thirty-one years old. It is about extending this market and removing any intelligent substance in the music. — Chuck D

It's not for me to determine what a country artist has in common with a hip-hop artist. You go for those with long-lasting careers. And that's what I've had as my target all my life. — Clive Davis

You can put your TV in the garage, avoid movies altogether, and use earplugs to spare your hearing from the sounds of hip-hop or heavy metal, but these forms of entertainment will still change your life through their influence on everyone else in society. Though you may struggle to protect your own kids from music that encourages violence or drugs or irresponsible sex, you can't possibly protect them from all the other kids in your community who have received full exposure. — Michael Medved

You can make something of your life, it just depends on your drive. — Eminem

I was in a competing company and have been dancing since I was four - ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop - so it's a huge part of my life and my music. — Tinashe

Hip-hop is about tearing down the system to better it, tearing down the system to better themselves. No matter how flimsy it might seem, they always wanted the finer things in life. — Russell Simmons

I think hip hop is dead. It's all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It's all commercial now. — Tracy Morgan

I always say, 'Man, the Creator is preparing me for something. He's keeping the sun on me for some reason. He's keeping me aligned with that generation.' Because I genuinely love people, I love hip-hop, and I love using it as a tool to communicate and to create a better vibration. Life is short. I guess I'm lined up for a reason. — Doug E. Fresh

You'll be fooled if you only get your hip-hop from the mainstream, you know. The things that move people are not just found in the mainstream cultures. And when we talk about hip-hop in general, hip-hop's basically preoccupied with life. — Talib Kweli

I despise hip hop. Loathe it. Eminem is an idiot and I find 50 Cent the most distasteful character I have ever crossed in my life. Eminem's new song about his kid - isn't it the most ridiculous piece of music you have ever heard in your life? I just don't like the dragging women around on dog leads and all that stuff — Noel Gallagher

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real. — Nas

Winner goes with the flow, History Maker against the flow — Kjiva

No matter where life takes me. Find me with a smile. — Mac Miller

I can't control what people think. I'm not trying to manipulate people's thoughts or sentiments. I write all the time. You have to experience life, make observations, and ask questions. It's machine-like how things are run now in hip-hop, and my ambitions are different. — Mos Def

Life is a gamble, we scramble for money,
I might crack a smile, but ain't a damn thing funny. — Prodigy

In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all. — Ta-Nehisi Coates