El-P Quotes

What works in Chattanooga now works in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris; it’s a little sad.

When I went around promoting 'Crumb,' there would be days I'd wake up in, like, Houston or Cleveland, and I'd step outside the hotel and get no idea where I was. It all looks the same: one big corporate, consumer theme park. It's all, 'Here's the Starbucks, and here's the Gap, and we'll go over to Banana Republic and the Cineplex.'

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Look, the whole world wants to modernize, and when you look to what they mean by modernizing, they mean Americanize. Would a modern Greek prefer to live in Orange County than Piraeus? Yes. Absolutely.

We are turning the world into a McDonald’s ecosystem with the same species living roughly the same way everywhere.

It was at the department store where people got away from provincialism.

Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.

I like it when I go to a city and it puts its personality out there to be readily experienced.

I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns.

Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.

Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.

McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of passive conformity.

Cities have made the transition from industrial to service economies.

Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember.

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

I'm always really interested in different environments and how they affect people's lives and what it would be like to live somewhere else.

New York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.

With the growth of both urbanization and globalization, consumers are becoming increasingly disconnected from their food.

Commerce seems to be covering every aspect of our lives now. Which me, because I'm a romantic, is sad for me to say.

People in Shanghai make a lot more money than the farmers in the rice paddies. The rice-paddy farmers are not buying Louis Vuitton bags, but the upwardly mobile ones in Shanghai, who are all working in Wall Street-type firms, are infinitely better-dressed than people in the West. Their women take this fashion thing seriously.

Seoul is becoming a global city.

I think, probably, socially, in some ways New York may be the least American city. It represents too many things that Americans really don't entirely want in their lives.

There is something romantic about the world being a diverse place, where every place has a Starbucks and Denny's.

Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.

I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.