AJ: You know the life of an artist as I understand it, it’s really more the life of musicians, people working on albums. Elton John working on, you know what I mean? It’s like, you have a success and then people want to box you in on that.
AJ: It’s hard to encapsulate. I think there’s a tendency, at least initially, to want to construct it as a kind of sociopolitical statement that dovetailed with Black Lives Matter. I guess that’s a way you can read it, but I’ve always felt there are things about it that are not so obvious.
AJ: Right. I mean Rodney King is ground zero. There’s a lot of complicated stuff that’s happening but one of them is the kind of tension around what black people have been insisting about the West since we’ve been here. That it’s violent, that it’s misogynistic, that it’s this and that, right? These things fly in the face of how the West wants to understand itself, and so we’re typically told we’re overstating it, we’re exaggerating.