Sublime

a pause that almost refreshes but doesn’t give you quite enough time to answer anything before the drum returns and the flood of questions with it. That’s sort of how life operates.

Something I truly loved and appreciated about Prince during the years we worked and lived together was the way he took artists like these—and like me—under his wing. When he saw talent that intrigued him, he got the artist in front of people, and his seal of approval meant a lot—in the audience and in the industry. He lifted them up above the noise

mention this because we’re at the point in the book where Ahmir is dealing more with the recent past, and while that’s not pitched quite as high as the future, it’s not as low as the distant past either. There’s less perspective and sometimes more of an almost physical discomfort. Losses are felt more painfully, failures still sting, confusion may

Game Theory had recharged us somewhat, especially since we felt that we were making our music for a label that unconditionally supported our vision. As we started to collect material, it became apparent that we were headed in an explicitly political direction. It would have been hard to avoid it, frankly. It was the end of 2007, and we were shootin

Do You Want More?!!!??! was acid jazz, Illadelph Halflife was a kind of Wu-Tang–influenced hard hip-hop production, and Things Fall Apart was definitive neo soul. We were going into the cocoon again. I wasn’t worried about our audience. They would follow us or they wouldn’t—I was used to losing about half our audience each time and picking up new f

Deposit multiple mysteries in the bank for later withdrawal

Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train

In my head, I imagine that when I’m dead, when I can no longer defend my records or explain them, the periodicals will stay forever, like they did in the reading room at the Philadelphia Main Library, and those reviews will become the final word on the things that I’ve created.