I really work hard to shape the song so that it's attractive... You don't want to give people the information in an enema.

People sometimes ask me, because of the blacklisting, "Do you hate the government? Don't you hate white people?" No, it's greed that's the problem.

As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.

I had no reason to want to copy anybody else. What I wanted to give audiences for the few minutes that I thought my career would last was something unique.

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.

Take a bunch of little kids to the beach and they all make art. Adults are too stupid to call it art, but it is art. They'll use their imaginations, make drama, make up characters, make pictures in the sand, they'll make up songs that no one's ever heard before. All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

But in the old days, visual artists used to fall into two distinct categories: those of us who created images with cameras and those of us who applied stuff onto other stuff, with brushes or other tools.