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.
Interpretation
Hip Hop transcends regional boundaries and should promote understanding rather than conflict.
This quote by Afrika Bambaataa highlights the universal nature of Hip Hop music and culture, emphasizing that it should not be confined to any geographical or cultural borders. By acknowledging the foolishness of divisive attitudes between the East and West, he advocates for unity and understanding within the Hip Hop community, encouraging individuals to appreciate its global impact.
In practice
In a speech promoting cultural appreciation at a music festival.
Everybody needs to show respect to each others' ways and the cultural life that you get on this planet. 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.
I'd like to see people pay attention to the science of hip hop. The knowledge part, the political side of what hip hop could do, or where hip hop is gonna go. I always say it's gonna become universal as we become a galactic union.
How you act, walk, look and talk is all part of Hip Hop culture. And the music is colorless. Hip Hop music is made from Black, brown, yellow, red and white.
I wear anything of culture, from the Earth or beyond. The whole planet is my shop.
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.
Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.
My biggest obsession is to show Africans and the world who the people of Africa really are.
Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.'
I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.
I think hip-hop is no more misogynistic than America is as a society. I just think hip-hop is a lot more brash, a lot more bold, a lot more loquacious. There are a lot more words that go into a hip-hop song than go into a regular song.
Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.
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