A Quote by Kano
As an MC, I come from a background where the onstage experience is freestyle-based: you never know who's going to join you on stage, or what you're gonna do, or how long you can stay on. You kind of lose that, once you get on to recording albums and going on tour. Doing Africa Express has brought me back to that excitement - for the unexpected.
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I call it "being interrupted by success." We had done The Soft Bulletin, which came out in 1999, and we knew we that were gonna make another record before too long. But in between this, we were still in this mode of kind of just - not re-creating what we could be, but kind of doing different things. For the longest time in the Flaming Lips we were like, "Make a record, go on tour. Come back, make another record," and you know, I think, frankly, we were kind of like, "There's more to life than just recording records and going on tour."
It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.
We kind of just got more mature and more realistic with what we're doing. We kinda said, "We quit our jobs and we quit college to do this, and we're going to be playing these songs every day just about, y'know, on a stage... so let's write songs that we're never gonna get sick of playing." Songs that aren't just gonna follow a trend of what's going on right now, y'know?
We are going to lead once again by being the best. We're gonna lead economically. We're gonna lead technologically. We're gonna go back to the Moon, we're gonna do whatever we're gonna do. We are going to lead by engaging in American exceptionalism and this is going to inspire others to come along with us. We're not shrinking away from anybody. We are reengaging. That's what Trump is, and that's what Democrats don't see.
There are going to be stories of very young kids that were brought to this country at a very young age who don't even speak Spanish that are going to be sent back to Nicaragua or some other place. And it's gonna feel weird and I understand that. The goal here is to have an immigration policy that works. And if you provide a path for people to enter this country illegally and if they stay here long enough and pay enough in taxes, well let them stay legally...why would anyone come in through the legal process?
In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.
My songs get to a stage where they resist any further change, you know? And that's kind of where they are, short of re-recording or starting again. That's kind of where it's gonna be.
I would say the three stages of making a film are the initial 'are we gonna do this,' 'how much will I be paid,' is there a lot of nights, who's it going to be with? The second stage of doing a film is how much fun your going to have doing it. The third stage is was the film a hit?
It's crazy. I don't know how I'm not dead. People think I'm going to get punched in the face: "Something terrible is going to happen to you. You're going to get killed." That's not what's going to kill me. The show is going to kill me. The work is going to kill me. Once I'm on the street, I'm not worried about that.
I think David Yates was just like, "You've got on with it for a few years, I'm gonna let you off the hook." And also, I think it's because the action side of stuff that we were doing, it was going to be very difficult to do all that with all the prosthetics on. It was gonna be hard work, and I think they just said, "You know what?" I think they put a level of trust in me, as well. They said, "You know, we're gonna let Neville Longbottom lose the fat suit, lose the teeth, lose the Adolf Hitler hair."
The first rap I recorded was on Jeezy's 'White Girl' beat. One of my partners invited me to his studio, so I go. I wasn't planning on recording, we were just messing around. And I started recording a song, just a freestyle. Back then, Jeezy was going so hard, that's what everyone was on. That's what me and my partners in the trap would listen to.
I feel incredibly blessed. I'm happy, but all of this movie business, and working as an actress is really hard. When you're not working is when you have to stay positive and remind yourself that you're talented. What's due for you is due for you, and you don't know when that's going to come. That's something I struggled with after I got out of school, wondering how long I was going to have to wait. Then beautiful jobs started coming to me. Now, I feel that my path is going to be what it's going to be, and as long as I relax and breathe, I can enjoy it.
I do think it's possible for me to go back to the studio, and for a lot of women filmmakers to be going back into studio filmmaking with a different sense of their own agency, and a different sense of the respect that they can command. When you asked the question about whether women want to be making big studio movies, the answer is almost always yes. It's just, how do they want to be treated? What is that experience going to be? And if you know the experience is gonna be shitty going into it, I personally am at a place where I'm not willing to punish myself any longer.
I can feel how an audience is reacting when I'm on a stage, but when you are on stage, your perception is distorted. That's something you just have to know. It's like pilots that fly at high Gs and they lose, sometimes, consciousness and hand/eye coordination and they just have to know that that's going to happen. They have to be trained to not try to do too much while they are doing that. So when you are on stage, you have to be aware that you are wrong about how it feels a lot of times.
If you're going to perform, you're going to attract criticism. You can't please everyone all the time. You don't know how things are going to come out. But that's part of the fun of it, the adventure of doing any kind of art.
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