I love hip-hop music, ... It's rebel music is how I like to speak about it. Hip-hop and reggae come from the same community as far as class...they both come from the bottom of society.
In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.
It is a different world, the underground. When you hit mainstream, you hit a saturation level and that turns some people off. When you are on more low-key stuff, it works to your advantage and it creates a buzz on the streets. At that point, the sky is the limit.
Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
I'm a controversial artist, one who dares to have an opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge people's ideas in a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I examine the America we live in, and I've always tried to show people that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue – it's been happening every day for a long time.
There is a movement happening, a quiet one. A low-profile, low-resolution revolution. Comprised of writers and dreamers, of guerrilla artists and thought-ninjas. Those with something to say. They communicate through text inscribed on true public spaces, rather than blogs and forums. Choosing fewer words, even without being bound by 140 character limits. Using ink instead of pixels. Sending messages in living, breathing space. Pens scream louder into the void. Even if permanent ink is not aptly named.
...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.
I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
Abduction was what it felt like on first listening to Public Enemy. Like the post-punks, Public Enemy implicitly accepted the idea that a politics which came reassuringly dressed in established forms would be self-defeating.
Pirate radio is like street art.
When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.
My art gets called political, as opposed to my intending it to be political. I think that's something that happens with black artists or marginalized voices trying to speak truth. Because there are things in the status quo to speak out against, speaking out against them will inherently be political.
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
