I was in a karaoke video in 1991, for a song called 'Sukiyaki,' which is a very famous Japanese song, and I've actually heard from people that they've been in bars in Asia where they've seen me come up in the 'Sukiyaki' video that they play behind you. I'm in that. I'm in a karaoke video.
You can hear 'Human Nature' all over our song 'Elevate.' It's an amazing song. That hooky arpeggio in the beginning is great. Unlike most Michael Jackson ballads, even though I'm a huge Michael Jackson fan, this song is kind of restrained. It's not a huge, crazy song you can dance to - it's just this beautiful piece of music.
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 difference between a good song and a great song is a good song is one that you know, you'll put on in your car or you'll dance to it. But I think a great song you'll cry to it, or you get chills. I think a great song says how you feel better than you could.
Video is a funny thing. It's one thing to be an artist, singer-songwriter, and use words and create pictures in people's minds. And then be asked to do video for it, to actually give a certain visual for your song.
When I'm writing songs, I write visually. When I'm writing the words down and I listen to the melody and the lyrics, I start seeing the video form. And if I can get through a song and from the beginning to the end have the whole video in my mind, I think that's a great song.
I didn't have song rights for the first video because I didn't know that it was going to do what it did. So for the second video, I decided better safe than sorry. It is a really gray area as to whether or not you even need song rights to make a video like that.
"St. Lucia We Love" is actually a song produced by Stratosphere music (also St. Lucian). The CEO of Stratosphere music approached me and wanted me to produce a music video for this song which was already a hit in my country. I felt privileged to have been chosen to do such a video. So every time I went out to shoot a scene from the video, I would get a still shot from the scene to tease the public. The photo of the amazona versicolor is is an actual scene from the video which was released on St. Lucia's Independence day (22nd February, 2013).
I would say a great song [is where] you like everything in the song. The lyrics move you, the beat makes you want to dance and you feel invincible when you listen to that song. A good song I think you can listen to but you get tired of it really fast.
I wasn't one of those artists where people throw my song and just dance to it. People actually listened to the lyrics.
To the U.S. and the world, I'm just known as some funny song and some funny music, some funny video guy. But in Korea I'm doing one of the biggest concerts; it's not a dance music concert. I'm playing with the band, so I change my every song to a rock song.
When I appeared in EPMD's 'Hardcore' song and video that was just crazy. Def Jam had these little virals back then on VHS tape. Q-Tip was another very important person to my career. He had me in A Tribe Called Quest's 'Scenario' video when I was first coming out.
When I would create a dance, I wouldn't have the luxury that ballet people do when they take a piece of music and impose a dance upon it. What we did in motion pictures was have a song and within that song try to elaborate. My usual method was to do what a writer does: get a plot.
We have tons of live performances that we're putting on there. We have music videos. There's a music video for the song called I Am Jesus what is one of the funniest music videos, like we just could not find a place for it in the movie, but it's like crazy funny. And we have the whole video.
Everybody laughed at me when I said I wanted to make a dance video, but when I said, 'What would it look like if Joe Strummer made a dance video?' everybody shut up.
It was a complete dream to work with David LaChapelle. I collected his books as a teenager, and I fantasised that he would direct the video for 'Spectrum' from the moment the song was written. I still can't believe it actually happened, ?and I'm completely overjoyed that he felt such a connection with the song.