Inside Rap

Number one, the beat generation was the impetus for rap - in America
But rap goes even further back to the tribe -- the history of the tribe, musically, and audibly. So this whole tradition is to keep the history all the way back for thousands of years, through one person, and he could rap it to you -- for thousands of years back and tell you whose mother, whose father, who had how many cows, who lived in what village...

..and it comes to america. The slaves -- the blues came out of the slaves, gospel, blues -- Jazz came out of all this -- poetry -- they were looking at whitman, thoreau -- luminaries, yoga

..so the beat generation was trying to be enlightened and the hippie generation started to do that -- i would tell people that we smoked pot and took LSD at woodstock to find god - to find truth -- it may be the wrong way to find it, but we were trying to find the truth -- rightness

So the beat generation had truth and introspection. and that's the beatniks coming out. I used to go to the Minor Key and cup of socrates and listen to the new york beatnik poets read poetry and have jazz played behind it -- in the 50s and 60s and Ginsburg rapping.

Some people are not singing, they're telling you a story to rhythm. story + rhythm = rap. and you can talk about your groin or you can talk about you spirit or your heart or love. You could talk about money or transcendence. So i don't look at rap as negative just because there are negative gangster rappers. on one level, those guys are telling the truth about what they see around them, and on the other level, they want to push your buttons a little, because the person sitting there in the suit and tie is the one starting the wars. So I believe the rap shouldn't get a bad rap from the bad rappers, but that the rap is what ever the person makes it -- if he's negative, he'll rap negative, but if he's positive, he'll rap positive.