Being 15 and like a punk in the DIY community, basically being with a group of people like no one else, it was the first place to exclude or call out if people were racist, sexist, homophobic or in any way prejudiced.
I mean people are sexist and racist and homophobic and violent. But I don't think of the rappers as being any more sexist or racist or homophobic than their parents. Certainly less, in all those cases, less homophobic or racist or sexist, and then less gangster than our government. It's stuff that people normally don't speak on, subjects they don't speak on, and ideas they kind of keep to themselves.
We as a society have created rules and laws and systems that not only are transphobic and homophobic but they’re also racist and they’re sexist. Because we’re all brought up in the middle of that, whether we want to admit it or not, we’re all on some level racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic. It makes it difficult for other people when we turn a blind eye to it. We don’t agree with the laws that are going, but we don’t vote against them. We don’t like what our leaders are doing, but we don’t pick up the phone and call them. We don’t stand up and protest.
My personal opinion is that you can't be racist towards white people. You can be prejudiced about them, but being prejudiced isn't an illegal act, whereas being racist can be.
I don`t know if this is good politics or bad politics to criticize Trump, but you`ve got to call out, just like people in communities when people say racist things and feel it`s OK now to be a sexist or a racist or a misogynist or a bigot, individuals have to call them out, I have to call them out when I see it. You have to call out this president when he engages, when he hires somebody that makes people even more uncomfortable. I mean, it`s not a difference in policy. People in this country, the fear levels are higher than I can ever remember.
We've got to start making people uncomfortable in themselves and not being comfortable being racist or homophobic or any of that. We've got to cut that out from the inside.
There's this whole debate about whether being PC is just being like political or whether it's just being a good person, and I feel like that's something that people need to take into consideration because, you know, people are like, "Oh PC culture is ruining America." It's being a good person. If you're offended when people are not, you know, sexist or racist, then you're a part of the problem.
The gay community hated me for being part of Odd Future. They thought Odd Future was homophobic because they tend to use homophobic slang, and they were like: 'How can you work for and support homophobes?' But they aren't homophobic; they just don't really care whether you're offended or not.
You can fill this table up with people who are racist, homophobic, Satanist worshippers, sexist and we can be arguing but if you put on a song, I guarantee that people will stop and listen and that's what I love about music, it can bring people together.
You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it.
It can be embarrassing being associated with a character like Finchy - people naturally assume you're just like him. Some people come up and tell me the most appalling sexist or racist joke they know because they see me as him.
We're always learning. We're all in the process of decolonizing ourselves - removing all the parts of us that are sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist. I mean, everybody in society needs to be in this process because everybody's been brought up in a misogynist, racist, homophobic, transphobic culture.
All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.
You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it.
On the first album, we were trying to do a pop-punk album with a classical influence. We'd say 'pop-punk,' and people would say, 'No, you're like burlesque-cabaret-punk,' or, 'It's baroque-pop,' and we were like, 'That sounds way cooler.'
I think that almost all traditional institutions are sexist, and they're probably racist and homophobic, and they're all of these things. But a lot of them, like marriage, are too embedded into the culture to give up.
When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish - people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people - and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.