On tour, people know that if they ever ask me what I want to eat, I will always say Asian food. I’m becoming a stereotype, but it’s what I want to eat. I want to eat rice.
A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t think of it as a job or a career – it was just something that was constant.
Then you start to realise, ‘Oh, I’m bending a lot,’ and they’re just standing there existing, and I’m bending around them. But you can’t blame them: they don’t realise it; that’s just how they already existed. It’s hard.
When someone is a musician – trying to make a living off being a public figure – it’s really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn’t have a personal life.
I think it’s our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we’re able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn’s case, we as artists somehow made it ‘cool’ enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.
