As I became very conscious and more aware of things I got very into the beatniks and that kind of stuff. They were very important to me for a few years.
Coming up, the music of my era was very conscious. I grew up on Public Enemy, and it was popular culture to be aware. People were wearing Malcolm X T-shirts and Malcolm X hats. It was a very cool thing to know who Malcolm X was. It was all in the lyrics. It was trendy to be conscious and aware.
When I came to Berkeley, I met all these Nobel laureates and I got to know that they were regular people. They were very smart and very motivated and worked very hard, but they were still humans, whereas before they were kind of mythical creatures to me.
I studied philosophy in school, became disgruntled by the fact that it was a way to have a very interesting conversation with very few people about very few things in very narrow terms and yet still believed (and still believe today) that there was something that I was getting myself involved in when I said I wanted to study philosophy.
I had very supportive parents that made the way for me, even at a time when there were very few women - no women, really; maybe two or three women - and very few, fewer than that, African-American women heading in this direction, so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.
When I started, there were very few women at the managing director level and very few who had families, which is something that was important to me. So it's not like, when I looked up, I could say, 'Well, that's who I want to be.'
I think more and more people became aware that social media was starting to feel like a more toxic space. And, I mean - quite a lot of incidents of people getting very, very angry about all kinds of things and attacking people.
Then, at age 20, I discovered theater sort of by accident. Quite quickly, theater became more important to me than music. I began to realize that maybe my talents as a musician were quite limited, or had a ceiling to them, whereas acting seemed to sort of stretch before me. I got very passionate about it very quickly.
I have a degree in journalism, which is something that I make very clear very frequently just so people are aware of it. I went to school to write... Editorial integrity is very important to me.
The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was, which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play. It became very important to me not to lose sight of that.
I am very aware of my family name. I'm very aware of the legacy that that kind of carries with it. And I think that I didn't want to lose any kind of hold of that. And I think once you're born into something that you're proud of and that you're aware of, you don't take it lightly.
I'm very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn't choose.
You've got to remember the Cold War was a very real thing then, so the relationship with the United States was very, very important. As was the relationship that I was developing with China: that was something I did very much. And they weren't conflicting things.
At a young age, I became very aware that not only did my family have to struggle but that families around the country were struggling as well. Also, being Jewish and having lost relatives in the Holocaust, I've always been aware of the meaning of prejudice. These are things that have remained with me throughout my political career.
When my mum passed away, I was very young, and I became very introverted and very quiet. I became very anxious about what people thought about me.
Teamwork is very important. A music label who has that kind of knowledge is very, very important for the artist to grow on that level. Otherwise, all the artists get into that zone of doing things themselves, sometimes the song works, sometimes it doesn't.
My wife and I will often have conversations about 'Good Times' and 'The Jeffersons' and 'Sanford and Son.' They were doing incredible stuff that was very funny but also very socially conscious.