I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power.

A lot of stuff that I dealt with - music was my serenity, like kind of my safe place, my haven that I would just use in order to really just get away from the things that I saw every day. To kind of erase the things that I saw. So I stayed playing.

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.

The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.

Part of the history of black people in the western hemisphere, in some ways, has been fleeing from this notion that they were black. So I can represent an ideal, and with that, you can demonstrate that there is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to run from, and that, in fact, a good deal of beauty that resides there.

I want to create music that you can just vibe to. Put in your car and just you know like you roll all the windows up and you're like dancing and you just don't know why you're dancing but the music just makes you move.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.