One day, my brother had his friend over, and they were in the laundry room, and I stuck my puppet's head around the door and then started chasing them with it and made my puppet laugh very scary. It was really funny.
Corporations are legal fictions created by the State to shield executives from liability… It’s like if I had a little hand-puppet, and I went to rob a bank, and the hand-puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money, and then the hand-puppet grabbed the money and ran out, and then I got caught and I handed the hand-puppet over the police and then the police tried the hand-puppet, put the hand-puppet in jail, and I get to keep all the money.
I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled it, like Stevie Wonder. A lot of his stuff was on keyboards, but he used brass and he used other things as well. I was the first artist, also, to use drum machines. I was really the one who kind of started that whole thing.
I wanted draw the cartoon characters, and then it all started to make sense as I was watching these classics come back to the theater like Lady and the Tramp and so forth. If you want to animated the dog, you have to know where the ribcage is and the hip bone and all that.
One time, it was really funny, I was going on stage... and they were like, 'Oh, we didn't mic the puppet! Mic the puppet!' So, that's how I know that sometimes I do a very good job, because they think that the puppet is actually, like, real.
Moe's the first character that I played that actually allowed me to embrace all parts of myself, including my physical appearance, the things that make me angry, the things that I would consider quirks or little things that make me funny. I still carry those things that I learned from Trinkets to this day.
Sometimes you can do certain things on stage, or even in a TV series, and people see the look on your face and they know what you mean, so you can get away with certain things. But if you can't create that look on an animated character, which is essentially a puppet, the line will hit the audience in a very bad way.
The very first audition, you just go in and sing. The second one, they give you this sort of cheapy, Walmart-looking puppet - before they give you the $6,500 'Avenue Q' puppet.
When I started, the music I would be drawn to would be heavy metal and new wave like Black Sabbath - things that seemed more shocking - and then, of course, eventually I would find bands and writers who were laying things out very clearly and whose words felt very sharp to the touch and sharp to your feelings.
I didn't get into Tupac [Shakur] until a little later, once I started understanding rap and people's stories. Eminem was the first rapper that I actually started dissecting the lyrics, and once I got attached to his stories, then I started listening to Dr. Dre, then Snoop 'cause they were all under one camp.
I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.
I used to think being in the West would be incredible and then when I was nine my parents moved us to Belfast. I was initially amazed by little things - in toyshops you could actually play with the toys, the schools were more colourful and there were so many magazines everywhere.
The Democrats talked about putting people first. Well, they put people first unless you happen to be a spotted owl or a giant garter snake or some other endangered species and then that seems to have priority. Obviously, you take the bald eagle and things of that sort, of course you're going to make sure that they are saved and that they can live and you're going to take every precaution that you can. But others - we just need a little flexibility.
There probably won't be an animated The Roots or Black Thought as there was, say, an animated Michael Jackson when 'The Jackson 5' cartoon show was on when we were kids.
I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
I actually grew up watching a lot of these cartoons - a lot of the animated series. 'Batman: The Animated Series,' 'Justice League,' all the stuff that would come onto Cartoon Network.