When I was younger, bands helped me connect to part of my humanity; bands that had nothing to do with anything political helped to form me. There's a correlation in that: If people can connect to music, maybe they can connect to each other.

I think of hip hop as a mass media, radio, MTV thing. It’s been extremely relevant over the last 10 years and rock music is just not anymore—-a tear rolls down my cheek as I say that.

In the UK, tons of records are now sold in grocery stores, because there are no record stores - it's iTunes or the grocery store. And almost every band that had an impact on me was on a major label. There's value in people actually hearing things, as well.

Music is made by individuals. Some artists will be very politically overt in their songs, some will be more subtle. You have to be true to yourself, true to your nature.

The Flaming Lips have been on Warner Bros. forever, and certainly everything I heard growing up was on a major label in some way, from the Cure to Radiohead to Bjork.

Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals.

There's the idea that you have to know how to solve the world's problems in order to feel that something is morally wrong. I'm always back and forth between optimism and depression about the situation.