El-P Quotes

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

I don't necessarily think the way people do, but that's not my problem. My problem is not to reinforce or destroy any ideas anyone might have about me, how I do what I do, what my intentions are, the way that I do it. My only job, as far as I can see, is to do the music that I want to do.

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.

I can only do music if I can do it the way I can do it.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

I didn't think it was fair to my music to label me as the daughter of somebody - I didn't think it described me very well and I didn't think it had anything to do with my music.

I've never been one to sit back and go, 'I'd better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don't want to lose them.'

There's no rule that says you have to make records constantly, like clockwork, to continue being who you are.

I care so much about making things that are useful for people to have and listen to, but I don't care so much that I won't do whatever the hell I want. It's just one of those things.

I have to be able to be the artist that I am.

I would never tell someone else how to use their platform, because I think I'm much more comfortable allowing the work that I do to speak for itself.

I've had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making. Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn't allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

I'm very selfish. I make music that I love because I only live once, and I'm an artist. I don't try to revolt against anybody, and I don't try to please anybody. I feel very strongly that I if love it, someone else will love it - not everybody, though.

You should do the sound that you want and not what others want.

I am trying to be true to the work that I want to do and be allowed to make the choices that I want to make.

The rule I stand by as an artist is definitely be yourself, and don't make music just for other people: make it for you first.

If you enjoy and become a fan of Tony Rock, I really appreciate it! But, I do my comedy for me, so I don't try and please everyone or appease anyone. In the end, it's for me.

We only do what we think is good and what we're happy with. I do that in stand-up, I even do it with my children's books. I don't do market research, I don't have focus groups, I don't care. I don't care if it fails, honestly. I'd rather have something that's completely mine fail than something succeed that I'm not proud of.

It's really tough to make a name for yourself without compromising and without fitting yourself into a real specific mold. When I made the choice that I would be involved in every aspect of music and not necessarily make music for radio or MTV, I was saying, 'OK, this is me. You decide who it is.'

Basically I just had to say, 'Screw everyone around me - from now on I'm just gonna play what I think is important to me and our music.' So I gave the big finger to all the current trends in technical wizardry, and just went off and did what I felt was best for the songs.

My whole mode is to do what I want to do and let people understand me through that.

What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn't change what I decide to do. I don't choose projects so people don't see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me. I think the problem is that people refuse to understand what drag is outside of their own belief system.

I'm selfish, I think. I think an artist has to be. I'm not worried about what people think. I play the parts that I find interesting. It'd bother me more to be just pigeonholed into doing what people think is ethical or that's boring to me. I don't pick parts with that in mind, I just find interesting stories. If it's interesting to me, then I do it.

Over the years, I was doing what I loved to do, which is my music. But it was always a bit distorted, because I was doing the music in the way other people around me were telling me it should be done.

My life is not a political campaign. I just write about what is on my mind. I just play whatever I feel like playing. Whatever is in my soul at the time is what I want to do. I have, thank god, enough people who are still interested in what I am doing so that I can go out and keep doing it.