JAY-Z

  • “Can I live and surprise the game?”

  • “The truths in every word”

  • “So I suggest y’all roll with the clique, bitch, who you with”

  • “It’s aight, just use your wits”

  • “To know the difference between a 4.0 and a 4.6”

  • “Young HOV, and you can feel every word like Braille.”

  • “Yeah, it’s a hard knock life, but it’s aight. you heard?”

  • Chappelle inducting:

    • “Being black in America is not as easy as it looks. There’s always an or-else: Don’t do this or else, don’t say this or else.”

    • “But like Sean Carter said about himself: I am so brazen, I am so brazen, I am raising in the sun sir, we do it anyway, whenever we have to.”

    • “This man is a diamond that was born of pressure”

    • “To quote 2Pac Shakur: A rose that grows from the concrete”

    • “And that to us is what hiphop is”

    • “JAYZ, the whole time you sang, you looked so cool, so collected, it was so beautiful to watch”

    • “He didn’t have anything to write his rhymes on. He would just memorize all these thought that came to his mind, an avalanche of ideas, and he would just be catching rainwater, and when he got to the studio – like god, he would do the verse, he would let it be, and it would be, and the streets admire him for this, because he rhymed a recipe for survival.”

    • “The way a white person might hear his music is not the same as someone from Marcy would. When he said this is jay everday, when he told us he would never change, you heard this and you probably said as a white person, ‘well may be this guy should focus on his development’. But what we heard is he will never forget us, that we are his point of reference, that he’s going to show us how far we can go if we just get a hold of the opportunity. And for this, we will always love him. Because he embodies the potential of what our lives can be.”

    • “There’s so much poetry if you got to know him, it’s just the way he speaks.”

      • JAYZ to Chappelle: You must have a lot of pressure on you to say funny shit all the time.

      • Chappelle to JAYZ: And you must have a lot of pressure on you to say cool shit all the time.

      • JAYZ to Chappelle: It ain’t no pressure, I just do it.

      • Chappelle to JAYZ: My god man you just did it again.

    • Chappelle: “I am honoured to be the n* that gets to say to my n*”

    • From Marcy projects in Brooklyn. Ability to speak about situation and emotions and feelings;

  • “Chilli with enough bail money to free a big Willy”;

    • “That shit was flambouyant, it felt like I wanted to be that.”

  • JAYZ: “I am not really into that mainstream shit. We went and made our own company. We don’t depend on the industry for nothin’. If you don’t play my stuff on the radio, it’s gonna be heard.”

  • “My singles are more geared towards having fun, they’re about dancing, those are records that people enjoy listening to while they at the nightclub.” Use music and comedy to 𓋴𓃀𓇼𓏜 efficiently;

  • “I am really a student of music. Every chance I get I try to cross genres.”

  • “I’m an artist, it’s my music, I can do what I want with it.”

  • “You find the place in that track to tuck in and not disturb the groove, where it’s smooth and just flows.”

  • “Right next to DeNiro, but I’ll be hood forever”

  • “I would love to affect culture in such a way that you remember it like that: This guy stood for us.”

  • “LL he opened the door for us to be vulnerable: ‘When I’m alone in my room, na na na’”

  • “KRS1 made it cool to have books and be smart. It used to be: Look at this n with a book;”

  • “Rakem had a big vocab he never cursed I was like: How is he saying all this fresh shit without cursing!”

JAY-Z: “What makes a rapper great is how close he can bring you to his experience. Like you can close your eyes and you’re just there.”

JAY-Z: “I look at myself as an ambassador for hiphop, to ascend to levels that other people haven’t, I mean as an artist.”