I can't see any separation between my music and my life. I play pretty much race music: its about what happened to my father, to me, and what can happen to my kids.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

I find that here in the States, audiences are generally less knowledgeable, from the cognitive point of view, though they are emotionally more receptive.

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.

Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary.

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.