In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white - everybody.

Rap actually took root in the Negro community, and then in the Hispanic community, long before it impacted on the larger American community as a whole.

All the tenets that I had grown up with were thrown out the window.

You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's celebratory.

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.