At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people.
Where I grew up, people obviously knew my dad because it's a small place and he was the top player for Swinton - they'd go and watch him play, see him in the papers, so they knew he was black.
Those original, black, spirited, defiant, rebellious musical masters. Chuck Berry was one of the first masters of Les Paul's new electric guitar; he pretty much laid down the gauntlet, and I don't think anybody's ever beat him since. Way before the British Invasion, I was tuned into the black guys that created the British Invasion. Without Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and the Motown hits, there would be no Beatles.
It grabs me, but not as much as it grabs some of the other people that rave about them. With the Black Keys, I'm missing crescendos with the sax, keyboard or guitar solo. It never comes to me. All my favorite music is rife with crescendo and I'm not hearing enough with them. If you can get the Black Keys to hear this, tell them I offer my crescendo guitar anytime they desire it.
I stop and think what they call "punk rock" today...give me a break! Let me know when they can walk in the vapor trail of Little Richard, which was punk. You've got a gay black guy with a pompadour singing about tutti frutti with your white girl. Fuck you.
You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he's somebody, that God didn't create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action.
Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
I have the strangest time to get cast in anything. 'Ghost' was the same thing. Six months I had to wait for them to decide they had seen everybody possible. Why not? What limits me? I'm black? Oh, am I black?
Only black people in the whole neighborhood, so let's break it down: Me, I'm a decent comedian, I'm a'ight. Mary J. Blige, one of the greatest R&B singers to ever walk the Earth. Jay-Z, one of the greatest rappers to ever live. Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest actors to ever, ever do it. Do you know what the white man that lives next door to me does for a living? He's a f*****g dentist.
I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he's a supreme power, and that he's neither good not bad, left, right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light a room with it. I think God is.
It is obvious that the great majority of humans throughout history have had grossly, even ridiculously, unrealistic concepts of the world. Man is, among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them.
I start from experience and read. . .always between polarities - loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud.
Racial discrimination against a white is as unconstitutional as race discrimination against a black.
We have this misconception about women in the military, that they don't wear make-up, but in reality, they're very feminine women. You can be a tough woman, and still be a very nurturing and emotional parent. It's just not always black and white like that.
It's odd to see a black person painting his nails in Miami, especially in the hip-hop community.
How did we lose our culture? Black people used to all do the same thing on Saturdays. We all watched "Soul Train" and "American Bandstand", got our fashion and dance tips, and then we emulated it and bought those records that we heard. Now it seems like there is no culture. The school of fish are all separate. Everybody's just randomized, listening to their own thing in their earbuds, and there's no uniformity. That bothers me.
Free-diving is all about dealing with anxiety. I've blacked out a few times. I've had big black-outs.
My mom had a Canon AE1 camera and I read the manual and that's basically how I became a photographer. I was in the Baltimore punk scene. I knew it was a special time, so I went out and documented that whole era. I was the only person to really do it of my friends in real black and white, beautiful portraits.
Everybody has their black moments.
I felt like I could get away with calling it Black Hours. That could easily be the most depressing record ever written, but because there is this sense of fun throughout the whole thing I felt like I could get away with it. Like "5 A.M."; that song's in a minor key and I'm just wailing away and it could have been just wallowing depression, but it's not.
My car is always black. I really struggle with red cars. I don't want to attract too much cop attention.
The first joke I got on the air I remember clearly. Dennis McNicholas and Robert Carlock wrote a sketch where they were evacuating the Titanic, and the last two guys on the entire ship were the two black guys, Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan. So Will Ferrell was running back and forth, saying, "All first-class passengers get in the lifeboat. All second-class passengers and third-class passengers get in the lifeboat. Let's get all the animals in the lifeboat. Let's put all the empty luggage in the lifeboat."
I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.
I did not have a computer until recently. I'm not really a computer person; I'm really hands-on. I can't make it work if it's all behind the black curtain. It doesn't interest me. I want to see what's actually happening back there.
I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.
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