The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.
Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.
All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.
When the music industry started collapsing, the logical people understood that the only place to go for shelter was the underground. If the world on the surface is burning up, and you know people that have bunkers, go to the bunkers.
I do get a lot of gifts. I get a lot of things to sign, too. People do collect the memorabilia. Between 'Poppins' and 'The Sound of Music,' there were beautiful plates that they made, and I've signed a lot of them.
I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.
The scarcity of the music not only makes the music itself enjoyable but it also gives the collector a strange sense of superiority.
When I first started all this, it was mostly music fans that came along, Stones fans. But now, I'm being taken seriously. I've got highfalutin' art collectors and everything!
When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music.
To be honest, I don't listen to much music! I've been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I'll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.
I was kind of torn between playing music or playing college football. I was going to college and really focusing on my music career.
That's where the Black Keys and Jack White have succeeded and I've failed: They've actually convinced college kids that they're listening to hip music - but it's just blues twisted a new way - while I'm playing for the college kid's parents.
I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child.
Folk music was out there. Clubs were springing up and they were hot with the college kids.
The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too.
When you're a college student interested in music, you hear all these rappers talking about dropping out. For me, when I heard someone like J. Cole rapping about school and staying in school...it inspired me to keep going.
Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.
All music is just a collision of sounds until you know its internal conventions and understand the nuances. It's a question of familiarity.
I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.
