My Music Is Made For The People

What Draws People To The Instrument Is The Love For Guitar Players That Play A Certain Way. I Mean, Even Though It Wasn't Intentional, It Was Hard To Avoid Copying Eddie Van Halen. He Was Basically The *bleep* Back Then.

I Think That New Artistic Challenges Help You Grow Both As A Person, As An Artist, And Then They Feed Back Into Your Other Work, And Tend To Magnify It.

Every Story Has A Point Of View And Whether It's By What One Chooses To Include Or Exclude From A Story Or Whether It's A Very Specific Agenda That Is Pushed, There Is No Such Thing As Objective Media. Once You Realize That It's More Than Just A Marketplace Of Ideas, It's A Battleground Of Ideas That Are Suppressed And The Ideas That Are Pushed Forward In The Mainstream Media Are The Ones That Independent Media Has A Chance To Address. I Think That The Democratization Of Media In That Way Can Be Very Helpful In Allowing The Truth To Come Out In A Way That It Might Not On Cnn Or Fox.

My Parents Met In Kenya. My Father Is African, Is Kenyan. The Kenyan Side Of My Family Was Involved In The Anticolonial Movement.

I Didn't Choose To Be A Guitar Player. That Was Something That Felt Like It Was Chosen For Me. And With That Blessing And Curse, I, Throughout My Entire Career, It's Been My Job To Weave My Convictions Into My Vocation. And Whether I'm Standing In The Streets Of Chicago Or The Occupy Wall Street Or In Madison, Wisconsin, My Job Is To Steel The Backbone Of People On The Frontlines Of Social Justice Struggles, And To Put Wind In Sails Of Those Struggles. And People Who Are Fighting On A, On A Daily Basis, At A Grass Roots Level, For The Things That I Believe In.