For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

Someone like Ashlee Simpson, she lip-synchs on 'Saturday Night Live,' gets totally called out la Milli Vanilli, and no one really cares that much. It doesn't make me hate Ashlee; she's just taking instructions.

Let's pretend my career in music is a bell. Whether you like my music or not is up to you. But you've got to admit I rang that bell pretty hard and pretty often.

What I've found is that a lot of soldiers are surprisingly apolitical. Their reality is, "Today I'm going to leave the gate for twelve hours, and I'm going to make it back to the dining facility by sundown with the arms and legs of me and my buddies intact."

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

I was a very repressed young person. I wasn't good at school. I didn't fit in.

I'm not harmful, just introspective. You can probably think I'm weird, but it's not harmful weird.