Mike D
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.Collection: Communication
I have an equal amount of patience as my grade-school children, which is not great.Collection: Patience
Wine is similar to music in that it's a purely experiential realm, and it's a purely subjective practice. That's sort of the funny thing about wine criticism or, for that matter, music criticism. At times, those are useful guides, but ultimately it's all about how you react to that music or wine.
We never set out to be superstars.
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.
We make all the decisions on our records... We have complete veto power.
We just have to be careful of our actions as world citizens.
Mr. Philippe Zdar is a little bit like the uncle of the whole Daft Punk-Phoenix-Air thing in Paris and known for being in the group Cassius. It was interesting working with Philippe.
When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.
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.
For a dude, I think I do cook. I'm a stay-at-home parent a lot of the time.
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.
I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.
Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.
It might shock you, but I haven't been to that many fashion shows, and I'd never done a commissioned piece for a fashion house.
LCD Soundsystem - they put the drummer in front. I always thought that was cool. Because the drummer is usually the guy in the back.
Wine needs to have a context in a social gathering to fulfill its historical place in this world.
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.
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.
When Yauch died, it was really like losing my older brother. I mean, I have biological older brothers, but growing up, Adam really was my older brother.
Arrogance generally is a bad thing, but with a band, somehow you have to have this gang mentality or this certain degree of arrogance to push forward an idea that's new enough that people aren't comfortable with it at first.
If it's genuinely new, when people are hearing it, they're not really gonna be comfortable because they haven't heard it a thousand times before.
I'm really kind of a little bit romantic for the lost era. There's a lot of us that are - kind like James Murphy, same thing - we feel like it's this magic era that happened before us. And it wasn't even necessarily disco.
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.
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.
I was a nerdy punk-rock kid.
I grew up with a clock radio next to my bed.
I don't like the George Costanza-style wallet.
I was showing up at the studio all the time with no bag, being like, 'I don't want to have a backpack. I've had backpacks my whole life, and I'm a grown man now. I should have something better.'
I'm in need of a man apron. A very manly apron.
Yauch was a gifted MC.
We have rocked the ozone radically, man. They could probably fix the ozone if everybody stopped what they were doing and they put some cement up there.
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?'
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.
For 'Paul's Boutique,' we had a lot more money and a lot more time. It was definitely more on our own terms.
The initial notion for 'Check Your Head' was just all three of us getting back to playing instruments.
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.
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.
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 have not been able to tour since MCA, Adam Yauch, died.
Thinking about the cold weather in England... Don't be afraid to rock the David Niven look.
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.
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.
What was interesting about grunge was that it was this death sentence to the rock that had preceded it, which was hair metal.
There is an overall seriousness in tone that pervades 'To The 5 Boroughs.'
We're downtown New Yorkers and had very close proximity to the events of September 11th. Like everybody on the island of Manhattan, we were impacted by it in so many ways in terms of what we saw, what we felt, what our daily experience became in the wake of it.
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.
In the time we made 'To the 5 Boroughs,' there was a political seriousness because of what was happening in the world.
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'm always careful to even guess, at any juncture, about things before we do them.