Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.
The mentality has taken over because of the way we've promoted things. It's been accepted, to live with fear, and to fear that it's going to be terrible, prepare for the worst. The meat and potato of our existence right now is influenced by what happened after 9/11 - we put our thinking into protecting borders.
Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.
I don't have a community like a black community to belong to [with] a musical platform that's been built for years and years and years, or the film-making culture, and I don't have the white one to belong to.
I hate the idea of street art. With music, I just needed my brain and my voice, which didn't cost anything.
If music's a political place, I'm out.
That's what I miss, being a real human.
If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.
Predominantly in the West, if you can only have creative voices that are either black or white, I'm going to say whatever the f - k I want, because no one's going before you, and if no one's coming after you, I'm just going to be the freakiest of all freaks!
I dont support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.
You need everyone to get together and just believe in it, and lead by example that it is possible to be outside the system, and that's really super-f - king hard, and I'm sure there's some geniuses out there who can achieve it.
I come from a generation where you put the art out and had the luxury to sit back and watch the world deconstruct it, and that was valued. Unfortunately now the work lives in a weird context.
If you're talking about coexisting and tolerance then you have to live by example, and you can't have shiny people all the time everywhere, which is what breeds that sort of thinking - this is better than this, that is better than that.
You have to have your fashion stylist person not sell out and sell your s - t to another pop star because they can pay them twice as much, and do it for the belief and the love of art.
I just think that funerals are a lot like death itself. You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control.
I'd be very controversial if I said why, and I don't do controversial anymore. That's too passé. So last year. Being controversial is boring now.
When mayors get together they probably have better conversations and have better notes to share about running different cities, and just do what suits. Basically, like when you combine all the religions and take the best bits, you should be able to combine all the cities and take the best bits, the information, the tried and tested things.
Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples.
I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
That divide between the rich and poor is so crazy, because even white kids are suffering now.
The music industry is so tied up politically. They're afraid they might let other voices in.
People say we're similar with Lady Gaga, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music's reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She's not progressive, but she's a good mimic.
With homogenized culture, even if you feel frustrated, you'd have to write a Taylor Swift song to get heard.
Now, [hip-hop/grime artists] Stormzy, Skepta, or the Section Boyz have to be validated by Drake, Rihanna or Beyoncé. They're rolled into this one urban culture bubble; it's not really to do with, "I'm specifically f - ked off about my country and what's going on in my town." We're very much only showing success to artists who impress American artists, and I'm one of them.
There's a bit of hope that a song can be about anything. If you want to write a song about anything, you can, and you don't have to put it through the process of having it be trendy or cool or generic pop or these types.
