Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.

Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

I couldn't live without the genius of Stephen Sondheim, be it not just West Side Story,but Follies,Company,Sweeney Todd,Passion.You can go on and on.

Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.

Martin Luther King was a radical democrat, by which I mean someone who is a foe of wealth inequality.

I have some notions that have people conceiving of themselves as capable of changing the world. That's why, for me, the issues of self-love, self-respect and self-regard are preconditions for human agency and especially black agency, given the fact that we have been and are such a hated and despised people.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration... "Joy and Pain" - sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.