Ali Shaheed Muhammad Quotes

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition - whether it's System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It's a group that I'm proud to be counted among.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

I don't want to paint rainbows: I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority.

Reggae music is not an easy music to like when it comes to the power in society. 'Cause it talks about changing society. You won't find it readily accepted.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

How I can be an active voice for gay people but also the music industry? This is the art we need right now. This is what we need right now. We're in a renaissance, and we need people to rebel, come forth, and bring messages into art.

What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment.

Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it's not connected to actual movements, it doesn't ask the right questions.

If you look at a company like Uber, a company that so anti-establishment that cab companies are trying to find ways to shut it down, one could compare that to how Public Enemy and NWA went after then-modern society in hip hop.

Kendrick Lamar is a phenomenal artist whose work has served as a catalyst to raise a new level of consciousness for this generation. His message challenges the status quo and motivates listeners to rethink our society's institutions.

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

I'd love to break America, like all artists do. It's a lot of work but, you know, it's got to be done!

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

I think that Hiphop should be a pulpit for the people.

A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

I mean, I was always interested in people like Lenny Bruce, people who are breaking the old rules and making new ones.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.

When I discovered Gil Scott-Heron, I discovered a musical hero, a man who spoke baritone truth to power over jazzy funk at a time when funky music was primarily about shake, shake, shaking your booty.

Being a fan of authentic Dada, I find today's art - what I call 'Bankers' Dada' - mind-numbingly dull. The most challenging work I've seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, 'A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards', is apt in these days of witless chancers.

My father was a painter and an anarchist, always getting in trouble for his performance art.

Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.