"This album changed how I see and hear music. Changed the way I thought about our lineage of artistry. I return to this album often. And since D'Angelo's passing, it serves as a holy tomb of what it sounds like to dedicate yourself to the craft."

"Foreboding in a way that would be too eerie if it were not steeped in a reality that Octavia could see was possible if we did not change."

"Sonically, lyrically, Stevie Wonder created a template for the modern R&B /soul movement. I wrote so many poems to this album."

"My sister Tanja gave me this book in high school while I spent the summer with her in Indianapolis. I started reading the dictionary like Malcolm because of this book. This was my entry point into Blackness in real time, not only as a people, but as a culture and an art form."

"Little Brother still stands as the torch bearers of ATCQ, the JB's, De La and the entire Native Tongues. The album is a top ten for me. 9th Wonder's production feels like a carryover for the next generation of Dilla stans. They're the OKP children of the blog era. If someone asked me to describe what the blog era of the early 2000s sounded like, I would play them this."

"The rebirth of the soul sample as a driver for contemporary hip-hop as we know it today, all thanks to Kanye West and Just Blaze. Jay Z at his lyrical greatness. There may be no better rap album from top to bottom."

"This book inspired the essay "Belly" from my own collection, which not only says a lot about Kiese, but about the weight and power of his material."

"Claudia took culture, took the visual, took the poem, and made them into a gumbo. Totally inspired and shifted for me what a 'poetry' book could look and feel like."

"For all the noise and problems and dangerous rhetoric, at the end of the day, this album both changed and saved my life. I saw someone who told me it was okay for me to be myself as an artist and rapper that as a young adult I just didn't think or dream to be possible. This album made it so."

"The language of prose that Toni mastered is what has guided every single attempt I have ever had at writing something that could never be equally as good. This is my favorite book in her canon. The way love is woven into every line makes this a masterpiece in my eyes."

"I first heard this song at 2 AM in my mother's living room on Video Music Box during my junior year in high school. I still haven't heard a better encapsulation of the neo-soul sound than this record. It transports me into a moment in time that is the core of my art."

"Recommended to me by my friend, the great Dr. Shamell Bell, this book unilaterally confirmed for me the need and importance of poetry in social justice conversations. The radical nature of the art is mentioned early on in the book, and Robin's framing of poetry as a way to reimagine our liberation struggle continues to inspire me to use my art and platform for the greater good of us all."