Before I had a son, I used to look at my father's example: he left me, he left my mother. When I had a son, I got caught in the same situation that his mother don't want me to see him. I started looking at my father in a different light.
There's something different about growing up black and Muslim, especially in New Jersey. It's like when I left the mosque and I left my dad, I felt unprotected, but I also felt a weird sense of pride, like I was involved in this other way of living that was cool to me.
My father left a bit of his life with me. He gave me a gift, as did so many other wrestlers, like Mike DiBiase, Bob Geigel, Verne Gagne and Gene Kiniski. They all left me with something.
I think losing my father was OK in the sense that it's cool for me not to have a father; it's normal. I'm supposed to bury my father. But what I didn't realize was that my father was my best friend, and that still gets me... that still irritates me a lot.
I've never had a sense of entitlement. I saw how hard my father worked for his money, and it was always made very clear to me that things wouldn't just be given to me.
My father died five days before I returned to New York. He was only fifty-three years old. My parents and my father's doctor had all decided it was wiser for me to go to South America than to stay home and see Papa waste away. For a long time, I felt an enormous sense of guilt about having left my father's side when he was so sick.
I'm only ambitious in the sense that I want to work in as many different media as I can and to play characters which are different to me and to each other. I want to do work that frightens me or challenges me, be it in Dublin or Zimbabwe. I just want to be working.
My father had a tremendous influence on me, and I think many children who come from broken homes, esp. when they're very early. My dad left when I was 3 1/2, and he left my mom and I. It was something in order to empower myself.
The world today is a very different one. Social media, which I use as a way of connecting with people, is something that my father never got to use. I'm not worried about defending my father's legacy. I'm very much worried about what the future holds.
This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it's a different kind of devastating.
More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.
If I was producing something, it wouldn't make sense to me to cast somebody because of who their father is because that doesn't put anyone in the seats in the theatre. I wouldn't go to a movie because that person's father is so and so.
Curating, in the modern sense, is something I gravitate to. Taking different ideas from a bunch of different places and putting them into one place or space, a story that makes sense or a new idea. Everything is remixed and taken from other things to make something new.
The success came very quickly and it was a different age so one's awareness, especially in a global sense wasn't quite the same as it was these days because of social media and because of the huge variety of media that people are exposed to.
Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind
Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.