“You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.”

“This is a practical country. we have ideals, we have philosophies. But, the problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence.”

“Hip-hop has always been controversial, and for good reason. When you watch a children's show and they've got a muppet rapping about the alphabet, it's cool, but it's not really hip-hop. 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.Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.”

“Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.”

“If I wouldn’t have looked under the hood, I’d have never noticed the problem. But as far as I know, the problem didn’t exist before I opened the hood. So did I cause the problem by becoming aware of it, or was it already there regardless of my ignorance?”

“That’s the problem with falling in love. It makes you start talking like a bad country song”