It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.

The thing I've been talking about with daughter is the idea of - and I'm talking about essentially in America - the possibility of, a lost generation. I've been listening to a lot of music - as a fan, as a critic, as somebody who likes to dance - but I hear, you know, within these songs and half the people I hear, these philosophies encoded and embedded in these songs.

The most powerful political voices are those with a different way of seeing and processing the world and the sounds that emanate from it.

It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.

If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts.