I know what tablas sound like, because my father played a lot of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.
You always wrestle with depression, you always wrestle with those things, because the events and the experiences are still there, and the things that take place are still happening.
I have a lot of fans in the Tea Party, and they disagree with me vehemently. But they’re fans, so we meet and connect and talk, so I’m open to everything.
The men can have a moral compass that is just unshakeable, they can have ethics that run to the core.
The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We’re fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn’t even get to America.
You ain’t got to change the whole world. You just alter it a little bit and you redefine it into something beautiful.
You need to think about the system that you live in and the comforts that you have. But the comforts that you have that are causing the discomforts of a massive amount of people around the world.
For me, I walk a line of fame and infamy. I walk the line of celebrity and non-celebrity.
If you’re going to fight terrorism, to me, you fight the root causes of terrorism.
Hip-hop is just something I actually know how to do. But I always had aspirations to participate in other forms of music.
I’m not in competition with nobody. I want to make good music for my fans who want it, who enjoy it, who learn something from it. And that’s what it is.
The rewards we get by being those weird guys going against the grain to me are way more massive than selling a million billion records. I like climbing mountains or going on undersea dives for whales and stuff like that.
I don’t think that politics are as complex as people like to make them seem or out to be.
When I started making my own music, I was more about recreating what I was hearing. I noticed that I had some control over what I was saying, and the effects that it’s going to have on people. I wanted to focus more on the positive side of things, which are more in tune with my morals and ethics.
If you’re informed, you make an informed choice. You understand the quality of certain things and you understand the history of certain things.
My approach is I put God first; I say “God willing” all the time. The only way things will change is with God. So knowing that I can’t really change anything, I’m just going to satire it.
I’m a big fan of science fiction, animation, and things of that nature. Other worlds and that type of stuff.
When you start creating opinion, and you start creating difference of opinion, you’re doing something. People are actually sitting down and critiquing. A lot of the stuff people hate, they really don’t. They only look at the outer shell. They don’t really get into it.
I want to make music as good as Radiohead, as good as Coldplay. I can make hip-hop as good as anybody.
If you feel comfortable, and you feel happy, and successful at your job, then that’s success. You define that as success, then that’s success. Success is not a general thing. It’s a personal thing. It’s a personal attribute.
I don’t really care about the GOPs or the Democratic Party. My point is the people, giving the people truth.