And hip-hop is about style and finesse and being creative and different, and to do that you have to be ballsy enough to not do what everybody else does.

The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.

All my idols have been in the studio with me, because they wanted to be there.

DJ Premier Quotes