I am not the least bit surprised that injustice persists. I'm also not surprised that resistance to injustice persists.
'Underrated.' That is the word that best describes Prince, the Guitarist. Why? Because his phenomenal guitar-playing was just one arrow in a quiver full of remarkable talents.
Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn't understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn't understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.
My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement.
We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.
'Purple Rain,' the album, is a great guitar record.
I named my son after Randy Rhoads - Rhoads Morello.
Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.
When you pick up a guitar, you don't put down your First Amendment rights.
I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition - whether it's System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It's a group that I'm proud to be counted among.
With guitar, I'd always mixed more sounds that occur in hip-hop, or occur on Crystal Method records, or occur at the zoo - so I've never been sort of tethered or have limited myself to the traditional rock n' roll vocabulary.
I am not a superstitious person.
Racism is a problem, economic inequality is a problem, not enough rock n' roll on the radio is a problem. But all those problems will become insignificant when the oceans rise in a way that threatens organised human activity.
I saw 'Purple Rain' in the summer of '84, and, 'Spinal Tap' notwithstanding, it's the greatest rock & roll film of all time. There's so much Prince coming at you that you have to remind yourself he's also a breathtaking guitar player.
I literally integrated the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. I was the first person of color to reside within its borders.
When I moved to Hollywood, I was expecting it to be this Mecca of extraordinarily talented musicians, and it was instead the era of Faster Pussycat and bands that had an appeal, but I couldn't do anything like that. There's nothing in my being that can do anything like that.
The system under which we live is owned and operated by people who do not deserve to run the world.
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.
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
Progressive, radical, or even revolutionary change has always come from below.
