A musicians or artists responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth.

I'd say that one area where my political views have remained unchanged is that, I am opposed to the government spying on everybody.

There's a lot of injustice in the world and it's what I sing about in my music and what I try to confront in my life as an activist.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

In my own way, I was a rebellious kid.

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

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.