Quotes from El-P

With me, I'm going to have a label where no one is ever cheated, ever.

Just because I run an indie label doesn't mean I don't think Jay-Z is nice.

Labels are curators of taste, and the best ones know how to monetize what an artist is trying to do.

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.

Rap music deserves truth, and it deserves spontaneity.

Most people aren't happy about being consistent and staying at the same place for years. People want forward progress and motion.

Everyone just wants to feel good, and I don't think that all music is designed to make you feel good.

If you ask me what people want from me, they would probably just want me to be true to what I'm doing.

I couldn't really be a part of high school, because I have a terrible time doing things that I don't want to do. I'm not good at it. It's not even like, I'm a rebel. I'm just bad at it, you know?

No doubt, there are times when I'm like "We have all gotten really used to saying whatever the f - k we want to say," and it's something that I really take seriously, whatever that may be.

I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I just want to make music that doesn't make me bored.

I believe that experimenting is what production is. But it doesn't mean much if you don't have a solid foundation in what you're experimenting with. You can't really deviate from music unless you know music; it's not gonna work.

Run The Jewels, me and Mike, and our connection and everything, came out of a period of time where I had personally lost everything.

I think any teenager, any single parent household teenager growing up in New York City, will probably go through tumultuous years. I definitely did. It all sort of righted itself once I definitively got on the path of being a musician or, like, following that directly.

All I ever wanted to do, personally, was bring something new to what I loved: the thing that I loved the most, the music that I loved the most.

If New York has just become a mall for the world, then what's the difference between being here and somewhere else?

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.

There are two types of people, two types of performers: Performers who know how to keep a show going, literally, when the power is gone and performers who haven't had that much experience and will panic and freak out and don't know what to do.

Standing up for what you believe is right, as well as standing up for what you believe is funny, standing up for what you believe is cool. As we found each other and the music that we do, we get to live out all of those things. That's what Run The Jewels is: it's all of those aspects of our personality.

When writing songs, especially if they're kinda semi-true to you, a lot of people hide behind whatever their idea of themselves is in the record, and every now and then, you might make a song that exposes something a little too much about you, and there's a part that doesn't want yourself to be exposed.

Atheists are just as obnoxious if not more obnoxious than zealots.

The thing about Steven Seagal is that he clearly wants to be a great person, but he just doesn't know how.

I just love Steven Seagal for his pure - his perspective on what being a hero is: just a purely evil, cruel perspective.

I tried to get Steven Seagal for my 'Stepfather Factory' video in 2002.