I was 10 years old when I first heard Ginuwine. I remember being at a friend's house, and the music video came on. I was just like, 'What is that?' I was just kind of drawn from there.
The first thing I remember hearing was just the dance music that was in the charts when I was growing up. I don't remember many of the names of specific tracks - they were just kind of early acid house things.
The first video I shot for "A Zip and a Double Cup"â€"I have two versions, a remix video and a the originalâ€"because I wasn’t really trying to do anything. I just came home and got kind of high and shot a video in the parking lot. I just shot the video how I wanted to do it and posted it online and the next day it went crazy.
I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don't think the word 'AIDS' came out until '84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn't know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.
The music video, Lil Nas X, he asked me to be in the 'Panini' music video. It was crazy. I was just listening to the song and I was like, okay, this is going to be my first music video but it was really fun.
The first film that I can remember seeing where, like, I just couldn't stop watching it - and it didn't necessarily make me want to be a director because I was so young, but it made me know that that's what I wanted to be doing - was 'Alien.' And I saw that when I was probably just over 10 years old.
I can remember when Pulp Fiction came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.
I can remember when 'Pulp Fiction' came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.
I always wanted to be a comedian, even when I was a little kid. I had a funny father who was in the news business, by the way. He was a radio news guy. So the news was always in my house, and funny was always in my house. It was sort of just baked into the DNA that I would do this for a living, but I can remember being less than 10 years old and dreaming about being a comedian.
I remember going to a bookstore in Chennai and getting recognised as the 'Ahista' girl. The good thing about the video was the director let me do just what I wanted. And my costar in the video was really sweet. I think it came across well because I portrayed emotions just the way I would in real life. I was just being myself.
You can't please everybody, and basically I just decided to please myself first on this record. This record is more like my diary and I am expressing myself through my music. And that's what it should be about. That's why I didn't change my name or anything. It's not about the name; it's about the music. The old saying goes that video killed the radio star and it's very true. And now I'm just letting everything revolve around the music. There is no image; I am just being myself.
I stood in the bay window at our house and I sang Away In A Manger. It was my first time on stage, but there was nobody watching. I just remember it was so natural and it was such a secret - like masturbating. I felt like I had to wait until everybody was gone. So I guess six years old would be my most important age, 'cause in that moment, I just knew what I wanted to do.
My first competition, I guess, singing-wise, I was six years old, and there's a video of it, too. I'm just, like, stick straight. I'm not moving at all, and I'm just singing.
I remember at the time - right before we started Feministing.com - doing a Google search for the term "young feminism" and the term "young feminist," and the first thing that came up was a page from the National Organization for Women that was about 10 or 15 years old. And it just struck me as so odd that there was all of this young feminist activism going on, but that it wasn't necessarily being represented online, that the first things in a Google search to come up were really, really old. I think to a certain degree we really filled a gap, and that's why we got such a large readership.
For starters, I should just tell you that The Band was always my favorite band from the first moment that I heard the first note of "The Weight" on WNEW radio. It was when I was eight years old and Music From Big Pink came out. They were my favorite band always. They had a profound influence on me and on my becoming a musician.
For me, being 10 years old and seeing 'Jurassic Park' for the first time blew my mind. I want music to feel like that.
Before I was 12 years old, I had no interest in music; I was just into football. Then I heard Don McLean's 'Vincent' come on at the end of an episode of 'The Simpsons.' You know when you hear something and you don't understand why you like it, you just do? That's how I felt. I just thought, 'I want to be able to write songs like that.'