My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.

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.

Bashing the elite is what I'm all about in my music because they absolutely don't deserve the privileged position that they're in, and we're seeing this around the globe right now.

I find it ironic that now water is more expensive than music. On the one hand, record companies can't go crying when they've gouged consumers for decades, charging exorbitant prices for CDs that cost 29 cents to make. On the other hand, when music is free, musicians starve.

Every story has a point of view and whether it's by what one chooses to include or exclude from a story or whether it's a very specific agenda that is pushed, there is no such thing as objective media. Once you realize that it's more than just a marketplace of ideas, it's a battleground of ideas that are suppressed and the ideas that are pushed forward in the mainstream media are the ones that independent media has a chance to address. I think that the democratization of media in that way can be very helpful in allowing the truth to come out in a way that it might not on CNN or FOX.

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