For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B

There's a unique component of music that is different from, the written pamphlet or a speech. There's something, when you get the right combination of rhythm, melody and the right lyrical couplet, that feels like truth in the reptilian brain. There's something hardwired in our D.N.A.. And when you get a large group of people singing together in solidarity, it's something that, in my experience, and I've played countless demonstrations and protests through the years, it's something that can really help a struggle.

Always question the authority.

When you wanna rock hard, children, lean on F#.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.

Poverty is not an accident of, sort of, an economic spreadsheet. Poverty is a crime. There are criminals involved. And those criminals walk the streets as free men. What my music is about, and what - this from the riots in the streets of Greece and Spain to the people's uprisings in Egypt and Libya and Madison is about is holding those people accountable, those who are responsible for subverting the entire global economy and causing so much misery and then laughing about it with their, you know, clinking their champagne glasses on their yachts.