Oftentimes people say to me, 'Oh I didn't know you could do so much with locs until I saw your videos or I saw photos of you at events.' So whenever I hear that people have been really inspired to experiment with their hair or their look because of me, it's very flattering and really cool.
A couple days ago, I saw a lot of people tweeting, 'Oh, it's so cool 'Home' is being used in the Olympics!' We don't really get to watch much TV, man, with the concerts every night, but I wish I could have seen it. I really just found out through Twitter and my management texting me. I thought it was really awesome.
I think there's a perception out there that people know me based on these glamorous photos they see of me in magazines, but I have about two hours of hair and makeup and then people to dress me, to make me look even better, in those pictures. There's really so much more to me than that.
I've been on the locs journey for over 15 years. I must say I've enjoyed my hair short, but really love it long because I can experiment with so many different styles.
I remember the day I saw my hair was thinning. I don't remember caring much. I don't care. It's just hair. It never bothered me much. I was pretty young, too. And it happened and is happening very slowly. I have a feeling dead people get really mad when we complain about losing hair.
I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.
I'm very conscious about the way I treat people because I was never really taught to treat people in a respectful or kind way. I never really saw that role model, so for me, that made me just want to be the opposite of what I had and treat people the opposite of the way I saw other people treat other people.
People will come up to me everywhere and say, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Larry King,' and, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Oprah.' And it's really nice, and a lot of people say, 'Is it a pain?' And I say 'No.' And it's not annoying.
People will come up to me everywhere and say, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Larry King,'' and, 'Ah, I saw you on 'Oprah.'' And it's really nice, and a lot of people say, 'Is it a pain?' And I say 'No.' And it's not annoying.
The videos I put on YouTube have expanded my audience beyond what I could have done at just a Hamburger Mary's. People saw the videos, started booking me, and literally 40-plus countries and thousands of gigs later I can basically say that YouTube has bought me a house.
My spiked hair goes back about 15 years ago. I had long, curly rocker hair then. The woman who cuts my hair thought I needed a new style, so I let her surprise me. I flipped when I first saw it, but I soon realized the look was really me. I've always been a little crazy.
Whenever someone comes up to me saying, 'I saw you in 'Carlos' and then I saw the rest of your movies,' for me, it's an expression that we might be doing something well. So my life hasn't changed that much. I just try not to go to very crowded places if I'm not in the mood.
In the beginning, I was very punk. I was very revolutionary. When they asked me to do Givenchy, I didn't want to do it. My friends pushed me. But the situation with my family was so bad financially. I really did it because, when they told me how much they would pay me, I saw that my sisters and my mom could have a better life.
Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out.
'Crash' came from personal experience. I saw things inside me from living in L.A. that made me uncomfortable. I saw horrible things in people and saw terrible things in myself. I saw a black director completely humiliated, but the three people around me just thought it was funny. 'No,' I said, 'that is selling your soul.'
Whenever people tell me they don't know how to get inspired, I say "What's the matter with you?! I could stay in my apartment and be inspired!"
Because of television, sports columnists have become personalities. I went to a party [during Super Bowl week] and there must have been 500 people who wanted to talk to me because they saw me on TV. I've become sort of the Soupy Sales character on TV, and people do not really know me as a writer.