'Gadgets and technologies have led us into very individualistic times. You can be an individual and create chaos like that one shooter did in Orlando…you can be an individual and change the future by doing some dumb, crazy bullsh*t. But making positive change is like going up a mountain that’s made out of grease with a pair of roller skates; it requires like-minded collectives. This is why bands work. This is why when a band is in sync – the bass, the guitar the drums – there’s nothing that can match that. One of the tragedies of hip-hop, I think B-Real could share in, is how the journals and blogs and everyone threw hip-hop down the stairs by praising the individual and knocking aside the importance of the group.'

'The group was the only thing that made hip-hop even competitive to the rock world in the first place. But the minute that you started taking the DNA of the thing that worked, it’s the guy and the mic — the guy is Kanye and just Kanye and nothing else — it started shooting down hip-hop as being a legitimate genre and being more of a spectacle. I think it was a disgrace that individual came into the talk of the genre. So the whole thing of “Me, me, I, I” has really brought it down to the point where people feel they have no power ’cause they’re not connected. Hard to bring it up as an individual — that’s why collectives work. So even in the music business where they want to just streamline it to this person we know the individuals of music that are incredible — like Stevie Wonder, Elton John — but so few are at that level where you can’t take your eyes or ears off them. Ninety-five percent of everybody else, you gotta work with somebody to make me interested in you as a fan. I come from a time where cats had to get together and play together to just impress you past fucking 15 or 20 minutes unless they was a super person. So, in hip-hop — I love the genre, I’ll support the genre — I’m dismayed by the individual efforts. I don’t think anybody is that great enough to hold anybody’s attention past half an hour just talking about their damn self. I don’t. '

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