People always say, 'There are plenty of black country artists out there! There is Charley Pride! Darius Rucker!' That's all they can name. They don't understand what we go through, and a lot of people who are fans of traditional country music, as they call it, look at us and aren't going to say, 'Y'all like country music.'
I always say, no matter what happens to me as a black man in country music, I can handle it if Charley Pride could handle all the stuff he went through.
Everything that I do on stage comes from seeing the Black Crowes in '95 in Charlotte. For 'Let Her Cry,' I was just trying to write 'She Talks to Angels.'
Time's Up is finally, it would seem, activism with some teeth. It isn't perfect, however. One of the first acts of protest - urging celebrities to wear black to awards shows - reveals a worrisome willingness to keep lunging toward those lazy, meaningless and empty gestures that cheapen the seriousness of an issue.
Every time you see a black romance, it's over-the-top. There always has to be extreme hostility between the sexes. He has to cheat. She has to show him how independently strong she is, not just as a woman but as a black woman.
Nobody should teach the black man in America to turn the other cheek, unless someone is teaching the white man in America to turn the other cheek.
There is something transformative if you're a black person cheering in a theater and turn to see a white person cheering for the same thing you are.
I've always seen My Chemical Romance as the band that would have represented who me and my friends were in high school, and the band that we didn't have to represent us - the kids that wore black - back then.
I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.
Audiences in London called me the girl with the black cherry eyes.
Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.
Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.
Shaming is powerful and useful. I'm living in New York, and my instinct is that, after the Black Lives Matter protests, which were organized on social media, the chance of there being another Eric Garner, choked to death in New York by an NYPD officer, has diminished.
'Basic Black with Pearls' contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.
I feel an obligation to use black dancers because there must be more opportunities for them, but not because I'm a black choreographer talking to black people.
It's an incredible dilemma to be an artist of color and to always be in denial about that, saying, 'I'm a choreographer first and then I'm black,' when in fact, that's not the case. I'm black first and then I'm also a choreographer.
Life is about choices. Some we regret, some were proud of. Some will haunt us forever. 'Black Rain' was very much about choices. The message - we are what we chose to be.
As far as stand-ups go, I always loved Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Sinbad. Basically, I love black comedians because they're the funniest. I wish I were a black comedian, actually.
Riffs are a repeating thing. They come back to you. Some of the things on 'Back in Black' were ideas we had knocked around on tracks before that: 'That bit - maybe we should take a chunk of that and slug it in here.'
When I heard 'Back to Black' from Amy Winehouse, I was, like, 'Wow.' To hear such a soulful voice that feels like it's from a different era, I mean, it felt so fresh and unique, and that was something that opened my eyes and made me believe that it's not always about churning out the same thing in this industry.
