HIP-HOP HAS DIFFERENT ELEMENTS DEALING WITH MUSIC, RAP, GRAFFITI ART, B-BOYS (WHAT YOU CALL BREAK BOYS)... AND ALSO DEALING WITH CULTURE, AND A WHOLE MOVEMENT DEALING WITH WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING, AS WELL AS PEACE UNITY AND FUN.
Hip-hop went through different stages, from the beginning in the streets of the Bronx, to the whole Tri-State area and then to the rest of the United States and the rest of the world.
There's a lot of people over time who have brought out all these funky records that everybody has started jumping on like a catch phrase... When Planet Rock came out, then you had all of the electro funk records.
I don't care if it's rap, metal, whatever. You still should play Beatles records mixed with Limp Bizkit mixed with Foghat mixed with Creedence Clearwater Revival, stuff like that.
The Universal Zulu Nation stands to acknowledge wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality, peace, unity, love, and having fun, work, overcoming the negative through the positive, science, mathematics, faith, facts, and the wonders of God, whether we call him Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, or Jah.
I'm as old as the moon and the stars, and as young as the trees and the lakes. My style comes from looking at what came before me, and from visiting a lot of places.
Don't get caught up on 'I'm brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.' You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492? All these names we're using now are just an illusion made to keep us fighting each other.
Since the pharmaceuticals don't make any money and they control the doctors. If the doctors don't make any money then all hell breaks loose. In communities like LA and New York they are using a lot of the youth for a test sight.
Well hip hop is basically the whole culture of the movement. There's the rap which is a form of hip hop culture. It could be breakdancing, freestyle dancing or whatever type of dancing that's happening now in the Black, Hispanic and White community.
We also want to try and slow down all this foolishness that's going on between the East and West. We gotta understand that Hip Hop is now universal. Hip Hop is not East coast or West coast.
A lot of times, when people say hip-hop, they don't know what they're talking about. They just think of the rappers. When you talk about hip-hop, you're talking about the whole culture and movement. You have to take the whole culture for what it is.
That's definitely my goal, and always has been through the Universal Zulu Nation, is to show that music breaks down all that foolishness and can bring all types of people together, especially when you can mix it and shape it. That's the beauty of sampling: taking the old sound and recreating it and making something new, or bringing back the old sounds, mixed with some heavy grooves and beats, so people can remember. "Oh, I remember that, back in the day."
You want to buy cars and houses and castles, all of that's on you and how America has systematized your mind to be into materialism. Hip-hop ain't got nothing to do with that. I'm glad that anybody making money has picked themselves up - I just want them to give some of it back to the community.
I'm fanatical about movies: African, European, Viking, Roman. I got into witchcraft and magic from watching 'Bewitched' and 'The Wizard of Oz,' which shows in some of my outfits. I dress to reflect the whole spectrum of the universe.
You put music in categories because you need to define a sound, but when you don't play it on your so-called radio stations that claim to be R&B or jazz or whatever... All music is dance music. But when people think of dance music, they think of techno or just house. Anything you can dance to is dance music. I don't care if it's classical, funk, salsa, reggae, calypso; it's all dance music.