I wanted to be part of changing the world. I don't want to just stand by and watch it be however it is.
What the media is playing is what people want is really a false idea. Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.
Death to the pigs is my basic statement.
A lot of what we say and do are regurgitated things that have to do with what we think we're supposed to be saying and doing.
A lot of us don’t get a sense of our personal power. I know the vast difference that one person can make in changing things.
Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there's no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive.
I was an avowed professional revolutionary by the time I was 15.
In reality, I know I'm not hurt directly by sexism; however, my life is made less because of it, so I started thinking about the fallout from relationships in which people feed off each other.
Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be.
I am a person who always feels like I am not doing the right thing because there's always so many things that need to get done.
I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn't want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, "Don't be sexist!" because that's not how I talk in regular life.
I always write knowing that people will hear it, but also hoping they'll see it. So a lot of times I make lyrical decisions based on what looks better. Also I write based on what I saw for a video. I obsess over lyrics in the hopes that they'll endure in different ways. I'm very precious about it.
What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. "Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we're going to go support the cannery workers' strike in Watsonville."
I had no idea how much the stuff I was doing was affecting people outside Oakland. At the time, also, hip hop wasn't able to tour because all these clubs that let hip hop come in now, they would never have let hip hop come in.
I thought there were too many songs about people's personal lives.
When I was five years old, me and my cousin got into a fistfight because when "That's the Way (I Like It)" came on the radio, he said, "That's my song," and I said, "No, that's my song."
In high school, everybody rapped. You just pounded on the table.
People give out compliments because it's polite.
I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I've also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you've squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.
Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.
What I'm trying to do is make music that people relate to, that talks about ideas that are personal but also make that connection to trying to make revolutionary change, and I don't need to change my music to get to a certain audience.
I've been involved in a lot of different kinds of projects. I've been on straight hip hop tours. I've been on underground rock tours. I've been on multimillion selling rock shows. I've been in the jam band thing, and both commercial and underground hip hop. Very few people listen to one kind of music.
I lived in Detroit until I was six. My older sister was living with us, and she listened to the Ohio Players and Stevie Wonder, so I grew up listening to stuff like that.
All of a sudden it became that hip hop didn't used to be about partying; hip hop used to be about putting out a message.
I just make music based on what I believe.
