Words matter. These are the best Mike D Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is an overall seriousness in tone that pervades ‘To The 5 Boroughs.’
I don’t know – the idea of a specific wine paired with a specific piece of music seems a little far-fetched to me. But maybe I just need to be opened to it.
It’s what happens when you’ve been in the game a long time. We had to grow up in a very public way.
We are exercising our constitutional right to be fresh.
Music is more available than ever. It’s up to people to figure out. Ultimately, it’s up to the business to figure out what the business is, monetizing that.
I feel no compunction to defend L.A. People criticize it, and for the most part, it’s well-founded.
I wanted to create this dialogue between music and visual art and vice versa. No matter what part of the spectrum they fill, whether it’s visual, music, or whatever, artists are interested in other art forms. Your brain is already kind of firing in that way.
Every vote matters.
London cabs always dis me. I purposefully give them a good tip because I’m trying to straighten up the image where they don’t want to pick up some shady-looking, bummy kid like myself. I’m trying to teach them that if you pick up the bummy-looking kid, you still get tipped, man. But they still jerk me around.
Each time you present a tour, you’re faced with these questions of, ‘How do you want to present visual information? How do you want to take the music that we’re making on stage and visualize that?’
At the time, I was living pretty close to Ground Zero. I had to grab some necessary equipment, put it in my backpack, and flee the immediate proximity on my bike.
I was going to clubs in Manhattan when I was 14.
Having to wake up at seven and go take the subway every morning, having to get over there with all these commuters and see every possible face of humanity and realizing that you’re just the same as these other people is actually an amazingly positive thing.
When you get to a point where you’re not beholden to a record company, then it’s up to you to say, ‘OK, enough knob-turning. We’re done.’
I don’t like the George Costanza-style wallet.
Obviously, there are moments that you look back at and cringe – things in the past involving violence or disrespect to women or disrespect to other people that are so far away from what I want to put out there now. But it’s actually a privilege to be able to change and be making records that reflect that change.
With ‘5 Boroughs,’ we were each working on beats, sitting in front of our laptops and samplers.
It’s really hard to find a lot of things that rhyme with Michael Diamond.
It’s never been our intention to sell millions of albums, but if our message touches that many people, then so be it.
Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.
Things change. I used to have a real resistance to it and hold on to things, but let things happen and go with it, and you will actually go through it, and it’s a lot less stressful.
We just have to be careful of our actions as world citizens.
To me, the whole thing with the roots of rap music was when the DJ had to supply all the music for the group with two turntables. And the whole criteria of what that DJ would use had nothing to do with what type of band made a record.
I don’t think about Yauch in the form of his death. I think about him in the form of his life. He was like my closest older brother. There’s just so much that we lived through together.
We’re doing what we want to do, and that’s why the kids respect us.
I was a nerdy punk-rock kid.
Lofts are great. But with a home, there is a lot to be said for delineated space. To have the luxury of a little separate work space is huge – and to have the dream-sequence master bath.
The initial notion for ‘Check Your Head’ was just all three of us getting back to playing instruments.
The amazing thing about music is that however many thousands of records I’ve got now, I know that there are still thousands more that I haven’t even begun to discover.
When I first became aware of music, it was probably the same way a lot of people do – even more suburban or rural people – from my older brothers playing music.
Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it’s never worked that way.
I guess when time came to make ‘To The 5 Boroughs,’ we had something important to say.
We never set out to be superstars.
What a lot of the world missed was just how caring New York became post-9/11.
Most interviewers basically just want us to rephrase the bio. You already know us – why do you need to interview us?
For ‘Paul’s Boutique,’ we had a lot more money and a lot more time. It was definitely more on our own terms.
That’s the thing with all of us music geeks – music is the soundtrack to the things that happen in our lives, and there’s music that’s unique to that movie.
Dub has been a big influence in terms of production. It’s inspired so many people and so much music – in terms of music where mixing desk was the instrument. Central to that is the echo chamber, and I think there’s a little bit of a romantic thing there.
The bottom line with a lot of bands that funk is being applied to is that they don’t really listen to funk and aren’t versed in funk. Like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot.
If people pay money to see you, they have to cheer. They can’t boo, or else they’re chumping themselves.
I remember going to the East Village for the first time as a fifteen-year-old and going to Tompkins Square Park. That really seemed like a pretty edgy thing to do.
On ‘Check Your Head’ and ‘Ill Communication,’ most of the lyrics are much more, ‘OK, you take that, and I’ll say that’ – they’re split up.
We’re banned from a whole lot of hotels, and we’re running out of hotels we can stay in.
Japan is brilliant for vinyl. There’s all this rare stuff that I’ve been looking two years for, and you walk into a store, and you find it straight away.
