Justin Simien Quotes

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

I like to make music, I like rap music. Even if I'm white, I support that music. If I want to support it or any other white kid wants to support it more power to them.

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

I hung out with the jocks. It doesn't mean I necessarily was one. I was just kind of there.

I listened to a lot of Jay-Z and Kanye coming up, which would be unexpected for a boy bander like me. But I'd listen to a lot of that, and a lot of Ed Sheeran, actually.

I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.

Growing up, I didn't really like folk music - I wasn't a fan of Bob Dylan. I grew up mostly listening to rap and hip-hop; it was this new form of music.

I turned a lot of people in white America - and not just white America, but middle-class America - into hip-hoppers, you know?

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

Music, especially as an adolescent, helps to build identity because that's when people start developing a sense of self. You can kind of tell based on what music a person listens to what kind of person they'll be pretty much for the rest of their life.

At first, Hendrix went and became a superstar in London, but if he walked past the Apollo in Harlem, no one would know who he was. I'm the hip-hop version of him.

Who I was was not acceptable to black L.A. youth: the way I spoke and my sense of humor. Everybody else had relaxers and pressed hair. I wore my hair in an Afro puff. Nappy. The way I dressed. It was all about name brands at the time in L.A. I had no idea. All those things, I failed miserably at.

I've always been a rocker. Like ever since I was really young. I had a crush on the Green Day guys. That's always been what I was like and been my interest.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

The attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

When I was 13, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground made more sense to me than anything else.

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

As a kid I was super into all kinds of pop. It wasn't until I became a teenager that I moved more into alternative music and punk rock.

I was like, 'I can't do grime. That's for kids.' - I was 20 at the time, and I thought I was a gangsta, a proper rude boy.

It really upsets me that the media insists on turning 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Boyz N the Hood' into 'black films.' They are American films. They may open the window on the black experience, but they had things to say to everybody. That's why they were so successful.

I'd say a big transition as a kid was when I started to listen to Good Charlotte. They were like a rap-to-rock/punk group.

I'm mixed race, and it's often hard for me to fit into period pieces.

To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.