I loved getting messages from people saying they were watching during the World Cup with their son or daughter, and they could see they could be involved, too. That was so powerful.
If you send emails to your spouse or your lawyer or family members, you want to have these messages be confidential.
Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.
Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And so the Asian faces that I saw on the news, they were the face of the enemy. Asian men, particularly, were either small, ineffective, or they were evil. And those messages were deeply, deeply embedded in me for many years.
The increasingly progressive messages in marketing campaigns are clearly a mercenary attempt to entice millennials: they are trying to be 'woke.'
We develop social systems for the handicapped, but when you're handicapped in your mind, society doesn't handle those situations well. I think we don't recognize or acknowledge the power of messages and how deeply affected we all are by the messages we receive from the media.
I continue to write songs that are topically related to social, political and economic issues of our time, but I also recognize that onstage, I have a lot of fun and audiences have a lot of fun, so I'm trying to package the messages in music and sounds that are fun to perform and fun to listen to.
When we're out there, you'll never know a lot of people are gonna look up to you. You don't realize it, but soon you go on social media and see all the messages and people try to reach out to you and you start to realize how huge and how people look up to you.
I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.
I've heard stories of other people that are similar stories to me - their mother or father passing away. People have come out to me on Instagram. It's amazing that they can tell me and confide in me. I always want to take the time and write these long messages telling them how much that means to me.
