The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.