I've never been one of the top five or six most popular guys ever. I think the most popular I've ever been was probably my first two years in the Cup Series, and that's probably because they just - 'It's the new guy and he's successful and sure, we like him.'
I think country music is popular - has been popular and will always be popular because I think a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it's simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.
I feel like when it comes to rap - like, real rap music - and knowing the pioneers of rap, I feel like there's no competition for me in the NBA. Other guys can rap, but they're not as invested or as deep into actual music as I am and always have been. I think that might be what the difference is. I'm more wanting to be an artist.
In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.
I feel that anybody who addresses himself to children has a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make available to children the very best that has ever been produced and to sustain the distinction of what has been produced. Everybody in the popular entertainment field or in the popular arts has a responsibility.
Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.
Today, kids are much more aware of what fashion means, but when I was growing up, it was popular, but not as popular as today. Like any kid, I was fascinated by drawing. But when some of the kids let go, I kept drawing and drawing.
I used to get bullied by the popular girls at school. Today, I am the popular girl, and the bullies come to my shows.
There's been people who've rapped and produced - like Kanye - but I don't feel like on the rapping side there's ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.
Without the piano, I would never have attempted to rap, because I'm a poor rapper. I'm enthusiastic, but it takes me a long time to write eight bars of rap. I would battle any pianist, and yet I would forfeit happily before even getting into a rap battle with anyone.
I was a minister in the Frente Popular (Popular Front) government, one of the three in Chile during the Pedro Aguirre Cerda years, and I was as much a Socialist then as I am today.
I wanted to unite the popular and the serious, and to make a popular symphony, a popular oratorio.
My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.
The things that have been most popular with people have always been a total surprise, and so I've never felt like I could really truthfully predict public taste, so why bother?
Let us not dream that reason can ever be popular. Passions, emotions, may be made popular; but reason remains ever the property of an elect few.
I have a few different managers, and one of them hit me up today and was like 'I'm going to set you up with these guys doing beats and such...' I was like cool, as long as I can do what I do. Just because kids are going like this now, I'm not going to do that because I am not 18 years old. I'm not going to rap like I'm in grade three because it's popular. I'm just not going to do that. It's not because I'm being stubborn, and I definitely not that guy that is getting older and does not understand the younger generation.