I'm not talking ideas, or even presentation. It's like in politics: You have to sell something to become an electric player - like your skin or your heart.
I want to stay away from politics, or else I'll probably end up putting my size fifteen foot into my mouth.
My politics were really radical when I was younger, and then I moderated like everyone else does when they start having kids.
My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
I never had a real job either. I sort of fell out of school and ended up playing guitar.
I have no plan to retire anytime soon, although remember I am 50 years old!
You go through these little phases and fads, and it never turns out the way you think it's going to turn out.
Some people say video games rot your brain, but I think they work different muscles that maybe you don't normally use.
You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.
Thank God we don't know a lot about Shakespeare or Moses or Homer or Lautreamont. These are the best guys we got, and their art is powerful because they're mysterious.
Playing live is a lost art, and you don't see a lot of bands that go out and play the way the older bands do. It's a celebration, and a lot of people treat it like a commercial or a distraction.
I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.
The Minutemen were seen as more of an art thing than Black Flag, although I didn't see them that way. It confused people when we put out Saccharine Trust, too.
I never, ever had it in my mind that I wanted to be in the record industry, because I still contend that the record industry is an insidious affair. It's this terrible collision between art and commerce, and it will always be that way.
I don't have to work on it. I'm naturally a writer. The rapping and writing, they can go hand-in-hand - but rapping is an art that you have to practice and master, so I worked at it for a long time.
Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.
I liked English and art and did a lot of painting. And for some reason I was good at math, but I wasn't an A student. I really had to work hard to get good grades.
If you have something you do that's unique, you just end up in situations. Your art can take you to places without you working too hard to force something to happen.
I mean, the type of art that I enjoy is art that - I enjoy a very broad spectrum, but I especially like art that leaves me a little confused and uncertain as to what just happened.
It was at Juilliard that I realized that being a singer encompasses so many things that I am interested in. Literature, languages, physics, history, art. You really get to explore so many things.
I don't listen to punk any more, unless it's right before I play. Not that I don't like it, it's nostalgic. But, it's for kids and it should be... it's not art, it's expression.
