When you're part of hip-hop culture but you're a Christian, people want you to be either-or. Or they'll create a category for you, like, 'Oh, gospel rap!'
I'm not really much of a genre guy. I think that audiences don't need that anymore where you just need a very specific genre. Audiences are very sophisticated, and as long as it's fun, it's okay and entertaining.
When we started, our style of music wasn't on MTV. It wasn't cool, and it wasn't popular. The only bands who were even kind of similar were Blink-182 and Green Day. But we don't sound like those bands, even if people throw us in that category now.
We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.
If you take 'Nothin' But a G Thang' by Dr Dre, that could also be an R&B record. 'Bonita Applebum' by A Tribe Called Quest could even be a jazz record. 'Bring Da Ruckus,' you gotta call it hip-hop.
I've never really gotten into the whole labels thing. There were times I would cover a pop song, and people would say 'You sound really country.' I gave up on that whole thing a long time ago.
I think a good movie is a good movie whether that falls into a genre or not.
None of my dudes I chill with are rappers. I don't put us as rappers. We're all artists.
Kids books Grownup books That's just marketing. Books are books.
The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.
Music is music; you don't have to put a label on it.
I remember the first time I was booked into a jazz club. I was scared to death. I'm not a jazz artist. So I got to the club and spotted this big poster saying, 'Richie Havens, folk jazz artist.' Then I'd go to a rock club and I'm billed as a 'folk rock performer' and in the blues clubs I'd be a 'folk blues entertainer.'
Some people say I make hip-hop. Others see me as doing EDM. Some people might look at me as a trap artist, but I'm not really stuck to any of those.
I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.
Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.
I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.
New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn't know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.
Somebody said to me once that Chvrches was an emo band in disguise, but nobody had figured it out yet, and I thought, 'You're not wrong!'
It's not like I set out to be 'the indie guy.'
I feel like I am beginning to be a part of a musical community, but I wouldn't say I'm a country artist because I wouldn't want to invalidate anybody else or to even begin to be so preposterous as to think I can just skate into town and get some fans.
When you label something a singer-songwriter record, you cover many genres.
I really love music that's on the periphery of not fitting into a clear genre. I felt like I was constantly being described as something I didn't really feel like I identified with.
You had Cash Money: that was just the flashy dudes. Like I said, you had different genres of rap, and we were just one of them. So that's how we fit in. What makes it all confusing - and this is where it's the gift and the curse - we never set out for hip-hop to turn into just something flashy. That was just our thing. It wasn't everybody's thing.
I think to describe 'The Gates' as a genre show is tricky because when you think of what's a vampire show or what's a supernatural kind of thing, I think other shows... maybe focus on that element probably slightly more than our show does.
I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
