You don’t have to say something directly to affect someone. You can make a piece of music without words that can capture a feeling of tragedy or struggle or anger or triumph. It’s the translation of the human experience into another form. El-P Read Quote
One of the reasons why I thought it was a good decision to put Def Jux on hold is that it’s a hell of a lot easier to dismiss something as a movement than to dismiss individuals making good records. El-P Read Quote
We all want recognition and validation to an extent for our art, but greatness as a trade for decency is a risky proposition. In my life, I try to leave the people I encounter with the feeling that they have been respected and treated with warmth and appreciation. El-P Read Quote
I remember one day sitting in the mirror with a saxophone, just looking at myself, being like, ‘I can’t do this; this is ridiculous.’ El-P Read Quote
I think that Gordon Ramsay is maybe one of the most entertaining people ever on television. And I would love to pretend to be Gordon Ramsay and walk into a restaurant uninvited and attempt to make them change their menu. It’s just a personal fantasy of mine. El-P Read Quote
I’ve never had a huge collection of records; I’ve never been a beat digga. I never been one of these guys who drives cross-country and knows some one-legged sailor who has a boat parked off some pier with a thousand Russian funk records that he stole from the Red Army in 1972. El-P Read Quote
I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats. El-P Read Quote
There’s a lot of pretense out there. It can be exhausting. When people see something genuine, even if it’s something as simple as two people actually being friends, actually enjoying what they’re doing, or actually standing up for each other, that translates in a big way. El-P Read Quote
