"In LA, we had the gang culture. In New York, they didn’t really at the time because they had already finished with that in the seventies. Motherfuckers in New York was smarter than everyone else, because they had books on the streets. You would pick up the books and that’s where the Five Percent Nation came in, giving the street kids and the thugs knowledge. When they wouldn’t listen in the schools, they would listen in the streets. The Brand Nubians came from that place."

"At 40 I was pretending I was 21 again in the Pistols reunion. I was listening to a lot of things people were giving me at the time but I had to relearn Never Mind the Bollocks. I’d forgotten how bloody fast that record is—even though a lot of the punk crowd was saying how slow it was when it was released. That’s how we wanted it though, we didn’t want that incredibly fast manic stuff. That’s the stuff that killed punk off. "