“I think it’s interesting for the European-based producers…this art form from American arrived on our doorsteps and then we had to interpret it in our own way. I would say the UK is a sponge that absorbs culture from all around the world and spits it back out it its own unique way.”
“I think if you speak to most of the producers on this project there’s going to be a particular period of hip-hop music they’re going to cite …hip hop was invented in our lives ‘round about the same time, and you listen to these records and you were being inspired to go and investigate some of the facts and influences that these people were talking about.”
“I think what people from America can learn from what happened to their hip hop that they originated is that it’s a global language. I think it’s really interesting that you heard it on the radio, you bought it in the shops, but there were no rules, there were no videos from you to go and check out. You didn’t know what people looked like but still it affected a whole generation of people, just from the music alone. People changed their lives because of these hip hop records that were coming out of the Bronx. Their whole perspective on the UK and the world in general in their own minds completely changed.
I don’t think you realize the power of hip hop until you travel out of America, which is why when I listen to that music now, I realize how influential it’s been – it’s a huge global force...it reminds me when Busta Rhymes came to London in the early ‘90s and he started crying on stage, when he realized that basically this group of tea-drinking hip-hop people all knew the lyrics to all of his songs."
“I watch MTV Cribs…I’m like, ‘you’ve got half a million dollars worth of cars outside your house, but none of you have ever said to me ‘here’s my first edition copy of To Kill a Mockingbird’ or even ‘here’s my library, come and check it out’ and I just think…I see the influence that this music and the videos have on people who are a million miles removed from this music.”
“If you’re a young person called ‘urban’ and you don’t have muscles, then you’re being made to feel that there’s something wrong with you because you don’t go to the gym and push weights. I just want an alternative to what I’m being fed.”
“What happened in the last three years is that so many more people are making music now and music is so much more physical…Anyone can make a record and put it out and someone, somewhere, will buy it. Something I always said about hip hop music, I think once Biggie Smalls and Tupac passed away there was a really big culture shift in what you could do within the hip hop canon because the pillars had kind of been taken away, the boundaries have been taken away now. There’s no one to come back at you and say ‘maybe you should say that or maybe you should it like this’…now we have a general, open, kind of free-for-all for anyone that wants to use it.”
“I don’t believe the stereotype of ‘urban music’ is solely being made by black urban kids from city streets. ‘Cause from living in England I know that there are lots of people of all different colors in some of the most suburban and ‘countryside’ places you’ve ever been to in your life that are making music that you think would come from the inner cities. So someone like Atjazz, I thought it was really important to include [in the black atlantic project]…
I think it’s really important that people realize that you don’t necessarily have to be from the culture to be an expert. Someone like Martin, his voice is just as important as my voice.”
“When I listen to certain [American] R&B producers I hear distinctive British influences in their music, particularly rhythmically. When I listen to grime music in the UK, I definitely hear parallels in the Southern hip hop movement, the whole crunk thing. I think that’s really interesting...”
“There was a time when people in the UK used to start rapping and people would laugh and think it quite hilarious that you were rapping in an English accent. Lots of things I hear from American guys I know is, ‘well, I can’t understand what they’re saying,’ and I’m like…’have you ever been to Atlanta?’…they’re slowing down time or something. ”
“The good thing about making hip hop in England is that there’s no barriers, because we don’t have a large population of people who are buying this music anyway. That’s the thing I like about the UK, there are no rules…Looking to American hip hop producers and people involved in hip hop music in America - they’re definitely under pressure commercially to make commercial records and I think if you’re in a place where you know that only 10 people are going to buy your records anyway, then you’re just going to do whatever you want to.”
“I had a situation where I DJed in New York at the CMJ conference of 1500 people and cleared 1500 off the dance floor with one record. But it was the same record that had made 3000 people in Europe dance…the week before. And it makes me think to myself, ‘what is it about UK music when it travels outside the UK, it has such a hard time?’ and I think it’s ‘cause the culture doesn’t travel with the music. So you see Dizzee Rascal and you don’t understand necessarily why he sounds the way he does because the culture of where he comes from is not coming with it.”
“The thing about the globalization of music is that it’s become very much about the music itself, the three-minute track, ‘I download your track but I don’t download your album cover or your liner notes or your pictures, so I have no idea about the context of how you made this amazing record. And that’s so very important to me because I don’t think that music exists without the social consequences and influences.”
