There's no real nationalism in this county. If you're poor in America, that's a criminal offense. You're not only a criminal for being poor, but you're also stupid and deficient. We don't have this national feeling of fraternity. We live in an individualist state where everyone hates everyone else, except your immediate family. We live in a mafia state.

Kanye West hasn't really done anything worthwhile-- except maybe musically, I haven't heard him. But he hasn't overthrown the government.

What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.

A lot of people come to America all the time for economic opportunities. This country is this huge work farm and you can make a lot of money here.

In underground music, there seems to be this real inability for people to express themselves in any kind of heroic or mythological way. There's this idea that we're all normal joes, and that creating a persona onstage or having schtick is somehow false and misleading and evil.

Cool thing about Fidel Castro is that the CIA and the mafia - which are both terrible organizations that tried to murder him again and again - haven't succeeded.

I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted.