Death to the pigs is my basic statement.

What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. "Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we're going to go support the cannery workers' strike in Watsonville."

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

A lot of us don’t get a sense of our personal power. I know the vast difference that one person can make in changing things.

I had no idea how much the stuff I was doing was affecting people outside Oakland. At the time, also, hip hop wasn't able to tour because all these clubs that let hip hop come in now, they would never have let hip hop come in.

I've been involved in a lot of different kinds of projects. I've been on straight hip hop tours. I've been on underground rock tours. I've been on multimillion selling rock shows. I've been in the jam band thing, and both commercial and underground hip hop. Very few people listen to one kind of music.

When my daughter was born, that was the first time I cried from happiness.