Jay Z Rap Quotes & Sayings

And through our travels we get separated, never forget:
In order to survive, got to learn to live with regrets. — Jay-Z

Stop screamin', you know the demon said it's best to die,
And even if Jehovah witness, bet he'll never testify, D'Evils ... — Jay-Z

House, rap, R&B, disco rock, they are all part of hip-hop culture. Why you ain't playing Kraftwerk along with Jay-Z? That's hip-hop. — Afrika Bambaataa

We create music to express ourselves and when the world relates, that's a beautiful thing. We're all trading off each other's culture, so no matter what lines you put-country indie rock, rap, we're all somehow gonna find a way to come together. — Jay-Z

Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way. — Jay-Z

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. — Jay-Z

Well I'm not just gon' go and do rap songs. I wanna touch, and maybe help, and see what I can do in these areas.' As I start looking around me, looking at things in ways that I can become helpful, starting at the first thing, water. Something as simple as water. — Jay-Z

I grew up listening to Jay-Z, and I think the first time I really became obsessed with learning and thinking about lyrics was when I started listening to rap; I was 11, 12, and started becoming aware of music beyond the familiar. — Ezra Koenig

Rappers, as a class, are not engaged in anything criminal. They're musicians. Some rappers and friends of rappers commit crimes. Some bus drivers commit crimes. Some accountants commit crimes. But there aren't task forces devoted to bus drivers or accountants. Bus drivers don't have to work under the preemptive suspicion of law enforcement. The difference is obvious, of course: Rappers are young black men telling stories that the police, among others, don't want to hear. Rappers tend to come from places where police are accustomed to treating everybody like a suspect. The general style of rappers is offensive to a lot of people. But being offensive is not acrime, at least not one that's on the books. The fact that law enforcement treats rap like organized crime tells you a lot about just how deeply rap offends some people
they'd love for rap itself to be a crime, but until they get that law passed, they come after us however they can. — Jay-Z

You know the type: loud as a motorbike but wouldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight. — Jay-Z

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. — Jay-Z

I'm pretty sure JAY Z don't wanna rap right now. — Young Thug

Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius. — Michael Eric Dyson

The Nets' a stone throw from where I used to throw bricks
... So it's only right I'm still tossing 'round Knicks. — Jay-Z

I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man! — Jay-Z

If skills sold, truth be told, I'd probably be
Lyrically, Talib Kweli
Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense
But I did 5 mill' - I ain't been rhyming like Common since. — Jay-Z

Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans — Dean Cavanagh

I'm a hustler, baby; I sell water to a well! — Jay-Z

The rapping is cool, but my lines aren't all that fly. People like Biggie Smalls or Jay-Z who say stuff that you have to rewind and listen to twice and be like, "Wow, what made them say that?" or "I would have never thought about saying that" - those are rappers I really look up to. As far as flows, I can give you flows all day. — Missy Elliot

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

They say a midget standing on a giant's shoulders can see much further than the giant. So I got the whole rap world on my shoulders, they trying to see further than I am. — Jay-Z

I got this black chick, she don't know how to act
Always talkin' out her neck, makin' her fingers snap
She like, Listen Jigga Man, I don't care if you rap
You better - R-E-S-P-E-C-T me — Jay-Z

I used to wanna rap like Jay-Z,
Now I feel I could run laps around Jay-Z,
Nas ain't seen nothing this nasty,
B.I.G. & Pac got it coming when I pass too.
You got the mic, I ain't the one you wanna pass to — Ab-Soul

Put me anywhere on God's green earth, I'll triple my worth.
Motherf
. I, will, not, lose. — Jay-Z

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime. — Jay-Z

I have periods where I listen to regular rap, Jay-Z, Eminem and Lil Wayne. The next day I might have some Christian alternative music. The next day I have on some dance music. It all varies what I listen to. — Steve Blake

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me? — Jay-Z

Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music. — Jay-Z

Cough up a lung where I'm from marcy son, aint nothin nice — Jay-Z

Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn't have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn't write it down on paper. He doesn't freestyle onto the track, it's all thought out. — Ice-T

Rap isn't poetry, not least because it involves music and often other elements that aren't words. But the way poets in English use things like rhyme and meter, and the ways these conventions both do and don't apply to rap we try to lay out the rules for rap, in order to understand the techniques that artists like Jay-Z and Kanye employ. — Andrew Hoberek

The average rap life is two or three albums. You're lucky to get to your second album in rap! — Jay-Z

Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet. — Jay-Z

But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places. — Jay-Z

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

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