I'm down to work with anyone as long as it's an organic collaboration.
Anyone that I've ever worked with, it's not like I just meet you or someone throws us together for the sole purpose of coming up with a song that's gonna be a hit. I have to have some sort of relationship, or we had to have interacted on some other sort of level and that's when it feels most natural.
It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders the day I finally finished both verses for ‘My Shot.'
There's a lot of terms we come up with for the music that we're making because we want something that's going to be definitive. Often there is no word to encapsulate the emotion that the music represents.
I don't know that Dilla was the father of neo-soul as much as he was highly influential in that time when he was doing what he was doing at his best… Dilla's influence transcended genre and it transcended region.
The difference between a Black Thought album and a Roots album is the texture, the instrumentation.
I'm tryin' to get some acting credibility, get some other work.
‘Rise Up' is very necessary. Point blank.
In a lot of places Jay-Z is considered God, Philly, our hometown being one of them.
When people see that we're signed to Def Jam, the perception has changed.
We are true to our name. We're somewhat beneath the surface, and I think well always be to a certain extent.
Commercial success won't come to us from a change in the music. It will gradually be the result of a change in the appetite of the audience.
The Evolution of Greatness' was an amazing experience, and it's something that we hope to have been a steppingstone for us to come back and not only do more NBA All-Star performances, but do halftime performances at events like the Super Bowl.
I think we could really play the Olympics.
The first rhymes I wrote, I was 9. It was Kool Moe Dee-style.
What we were doing was alien in '92. We were less than immediately accepted by our fans and peers.
The Roots want to dip our toes into everything in the arts.
We usually overrecord. Then we boil it down to the cream of the cream.
You can only be the great artist for so long - come out with effort after effort that garners all this praise.
I move in silence. I don't like puttin' too much of me out there to be dissected, analyzed.
