I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music.
I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.
I don't consider myself just a rapper or just a singer. I'm a music producer, lyricist. I'm a poet as well, and acting is also a part of big entertainment.
Quite a few musicians came to our house. And my ma took me to hear many more, hoping to encourage in me a love of music. But she wouldn't consent to my having music lessons, for she feared I might end up as she had done - unable to play except from paper.
The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines and satellite navigation to music recommendation systems.
Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.
Just, you know, you can't put bread in a cold oven. You know, you've got to take your time. You've got to heat it up. So that's what, that's what I like to do with my music. I like to build it, and build it into a maddening, exciting crescendo.
I wanted to do it my way with my career, and I had this arrogant notion that people weren't just interested in my music but me as a person. That was my bit of arrogance, I guess. That's something I learned from Madonna. I was a fan right from the first time I heard 'Holiday.'
Three 6 Mafia have been around for a long time; we've made a lot of music. Anybody's music can influence anybody. I've heard people say that our music has influenced such and such, and it could be true, and it could not.
I think Mozart's operas 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.
We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.
I love singing. It's who I am. When I act, I take a small part of myself and just magnify it, but when I'm singing, that's who I am. I don't write music, so I choose songs that I would have written.
My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.
Some movies work really well with music from Bach or Mahler that existed long before the film, so music has its own autonomy.
Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.
My music is - I don't want to say my main focus, but it's what comes most naturally to me.
The main reason people want to pay for Spotify is really portability. People are saying, 'I want to have my music with me.'
Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.
You always gonna feel me. That's my main thing. When I'm speaking in my music, you gotta feel me.
My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was 'coded': it was called 'Reasonable Doubt.' So the things I was talking about... I was talking about in slang, and it was something that people in the music business was not really privy to. They didn't understand totally what I was saying or what I was talking about.
