Malik Yusef Quotes

It's all economic. Soda is easier to sell than orange juice because its costs less. Water, some coloring, some fizz, and this can, and we can sell this to you over and over and over again. And that's what rap is.

I've broken it down to three basic types of people in gangs.

You have the first type, the most dangerous, which are the glory seekers. They just want to be popular, they want to be stars, and they can do that in gangbanging. Then you have the one that I think is the worst, which is the one that's expected to be in the gang. Then you have the ones that were like me; they had to be.

They don't want art that might actually change the community.

They just want consumers. They don't want people to manufacture things. They'll do the manufacturing, and they just need people to buy it, need youth to buy it.

Administrators tend to lump Asians in Chicago into one group, not understanding that these kids would be fighting each other, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. We started a thing called cultural gift sharing, where everyone comes and says what his culture is, so the teachers and the administrators could understand they are different.

I see myself as the oldest griot tradition of speaking to truth out here.

There's a dark side that people don't even know is there.

The normal kid can differentiate between various aspects of life, but a kid with dyslexia has to connect all those dots, and they have to link it like a chain. Teachers can't incorporate that. They don't have time; it's not their fault. They don't have the resources to give personal attention to each kid in the classroom.

You got to have dedicated people, a lot of dedicated folk.

There's only so much one person can do. We really have to find people in our community that can give an hour a week. I was recruited because I started gangbanging at 12. I understand the structure; I understand the people inside.

The stories circulating that Kanye West's laptop has been stolen are completely false. His laptop has never been out of his possession. Hence, the laptop has not been hacked, and there has been no leak of personal data such as unreleased music, photographs, designs, videos or any other personal files. The leak today of the unreleased track 'Awesome' was unrelated and completely coincidental.

So the only way I could stave off any of these assaults was to become a gang banger, and to excel, so I could quell the behavior. If I excelled, then I could call the shots. So I became a community leader from inside.

With those organizations, it's like time travel.

I just reach back and find little kids who were like me. Maybe the circumstances vary, but the formula is the same. They're having problems reading, having problems grasping some of the things that are being taught to them.

The poet's role has changed over the centuries, the ages.

The poets, the griots, used to be the keepers of the facts; they were the story tellers, and the stories were allegorically written truths: where we came from, how we migrated over this river, got with this tribe, became this nation, and tamed the mountains. It changed from that to being purely entertainment. And once it became purely entertainment, it lost something.

I thought about ancient times when we didn't have electric light.

People were slaves to the ebb and the flow of the light cycle. Good Morning and Good Night represents one light cycle.