A Quote by Aesop Rock

Really, my biggest risk was just the initial step to quit my day job to do music. I was packaging and shipping for an art gallery in Manhattan; I went to school for painting, so I always wanted to work around artwork, even though I wasn't really contributing anything to the scene.
I was really into artwork in high school and my art teacher made it clear to me that it's not really a career. She insisted that if I wanted to make a living this way, I would have to find a career that might actually reward me for the artwork.
I've always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller. I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
I'll tell anyone anything about my life, and that is my biggest goal is to always be authentic - in my music, in my artwork, in everything I do. It has to be who I really am.
I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore
With acting, I'm taking somebody else's work and interpreting it. Whereas with music, it's organic. It's completely myself. Nobody else is really involved with the beginning stages of it. Art is something that I haven't really put out to the public. There's a couple pictures on MySpace, but I haven't done a gallery opening or anything like that. Art is very personal to me. I haven't really shared it with too many people.
I always wanted to be a musician from when I was kid. It was always a massive dream of mine. School was also really really important to me and having an education was top of my priority. So I really wanted to have a degree before I tried anything in the music industry.
Even though I could sing, I didn't really mix anything and I wasn't really into rock. But after my experience of being around what it's like live and on-stage, it was just crazy. And when you grow in music, things just change.
I've always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.
I used to ride the school bus to school and just listen to music with my headphones. I'd stick my head out the window and just think about how much I wanted to be a singer. I always wanted to do it, but I think I was always in the wrong place. I didn't really have any opportunities. So I left LA four years ago and I really just left my old life behind. I threw everything into pursuing music.
I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
I always wanted to be an artist, I just didn't know that you could be, or how you could be. I went to an art high school but they never even took me to a gallery.
It's never really fun to have to cry in a scene, or anything like that. I just try to put myself in the characters position, and that helps. It's never really fun, but at the same time, if you're having a really bad day, it's a great way to get out all of your frustration by doing a really angry or sad scene. That's always a good release.
Atlanta is a very good scene for the type of music I'm making. The biggest radio stations are all trap or rap stations. All the clubs are just based around this music and just the southern sound, that's what I really love about the city.
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
I'm happy that the evolution of art in the past 25 years, and the place of art in global culture-and even finance-has gotten to be so important. One thing I'm really proud of is the fact that now anybody can do anything. The work can be small or large, painting or sculpture, whatever it might be-it's all viable, and it can come from any part of the world. So the idea of democracy has really taken hold.
I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.
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