A Quote by Kyle
Pete Rock, CL Smooth, all this East Coast stuff - that's kind of, like, the rappers I first admired. I wanna rap just like them because I just thought they were so hard. I thought their delivery was so crazy.
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Randomly enough, all of my favorite rappers growing up were East Coast rappers. I don't know. I just related to them a little more at first - because if you're born in L.A., and you lived there your whole life, Snoop Dogg literally sounds like cars driving by. You feel me? You hear Snoop Dogg so much.
I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."
In starting to learn about film festivals and what were good ones - 'cause there are five billion of them - it was just a really good East Coast festival. And I thought this little movie was an East Coast film.
They thought we were just basically keeping ourselves underground on purpose. And it was just strange for people to approach music that way. And for rap, trying to get recognition, and be seen as a regular form of music like anything else. I mean, the Soul, R&B, Rock 'N Roll, they would dis the hell out of rap when it first came out.
I kind of remember a friend of mine saying, like, you guys should make a rap record. You know, because we were already making punk records. We were a punk band. And I kind of thought, that's crazy.
There was a lot of stuff [in Rock of Ages] that had effects in it and I thought it was too smooth. I thought it would be sexier if it were in-camera cuts. So I did that.
When we first started, I didn't know there was Christian rock or Christian music. I just thought we were a rock band that stuck to our convictions... Like every other hardcore band out there sang or screamed what they thought, we did the same thing.
If you get a chance to go outside of the country, you start examining where you're from and some of the thought processes. Like when I finally got away from the east coast for a while, and I came back there was just this underlying anger that I never noticed before, because I was born there and just dropped right into it.
It's just that when you heard hip-hop, no matter where you were, it was a culture that kind of made you want to try to be part of it. Whether you thought you were an artist, whether you thought you could be a DJ, whether you thought you could breakdance, or whether you thought you could rap. It was the kind of culture that had a lot of open doors.
I never really thought in terms of the concept of being a rock star - being around people like that just seemed like normal day-in-the-life stuff to me. Those were just the surroundings I grew up in.
I had written rap songs in the early '90s and even did a couple homemade rap songs with my brother in like '88 or '89, but it was just like... I don't even know how to say it. Just plain rap. I was just rapping about whatever, there was no real style or direction, it was just semi-braggadocious rhymes that probably imitated 100 other rappers.
I listen to a lot of crazy stuff like pop, techno, rock, hip-hop, rap, baladas, bachata...my iPod is crazy. I like listening to a lot of stuff in different languages, so my music is always out there for me.
Our talent and skill as rappers is clearly the first thing you notice. I don't know what we were thinking. We just really love rap and wanted to be rappers. Is that weird?
90% of the people that rap are just rappers, they rap what they see, a lot of them exploit other peoples lives, I've been through it all, I don't glorify it cos when I was in jail, I wasn't like YES I'm in jail now I can say that in my rap.
Rap is something you can just throw on the skillet and fry up real quick. That's how it comes to me, my train of thought. It's like getting dressed - I don't have to sit down and stare at clothes, I just pick what I like and put it on. But rock, you gotta put it in the oven and let it bake.
I can do a whole project with Madlib and turn around and do a record with Gucci Mane. Gucci Mane, E-40, and Black Thought on the same record. I like all those rappers, so why can't I work with them in some type of capacity? It just speaks to my versatility. I don't just listen to one type of rap. I listen to all of it so I can make all of it.
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