Malik Yusef Quotes

#1. 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.

Malik Yusef

#2. 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.

Malik Yusef

#3. 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.

Malik Yusef

#4. 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.

Malik Yusef

#5. 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.

Malik Yusef

#6. 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.

Malik Yusef

#7. 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.

Malik Yusef

#8. I let them [Kanye and Pharrell] be them; they let me be me. I'm just a little boy that does poetry whose friends got famous, and I like it that way. I like to be found. I don't want to be overexposed. I love when people discover me and discover my music.

Malik Yusef