I sort of look at music as helping me get through situations.

People do look at it as an insult that I say I don't listen to country music, which cracks me up.

People look up to me, like my music, and even follow me on Instagram because they know I'm keeping it real with them.

Starting out with music, I was very successful, and me getting into film, I definitely look forward to giving it my all. What you put in is what you get out.

I feel like it's our job, between me and Jeezy and Gucci - I feel that's who the streets look at as far as trap music. So if it's gonna be saved, we have to save it.

Both my parents are artists, so that just makes me look at everything slightly different. I listened to different music; I dressed differently. So I kind of grew up without following the pack.

First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it's a better way of telling the stories.

As Erykah Badu, it has nothing to do with me, the way I look, my hair wrap, my style, it's about you and what you feel for my music. If I can make you feel like the way that people who influenced me made me feel, that's completion.

I think people look at dance music and see it as kind of a bad thing, and bad people hang out in nightclubs, but it never felt that way for me. Growing up in Chicago, music was the thing that saved me, that kept me on the straight and narrow.

I get to do my own thing with music. I get to write the songs and sing the songs. As an actor, you have to do what someone else tells you to do and say someone else's words. And you're limited by the way you look and music is just more rewarding creatively for me.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

Siouxsie Sioux was such an inspiration when I was a teenager because I connected with these goth college students who listened to this genre of music. She showed me that femininity didn't necessarily have to look the way that I was familiar with. It could be more exciting and much more identifiable.

I occasionally rapped along to some homegrown Korean rap. And then a friend introduced me to Wu-Tang and played me 'Enter the 36th Chambers.' It was very shocking. And then I started to look for different albums. This was pre-Internet, so it's hard to find the music, and it was even harder to find music videos.

When I create a song, I immediately think about what I'm going to wear when I perform that song. I think about the music video treatment and about how I'm going to look on stage when I perform the record. The connection is so obvious that it's a single package. An outfit, to me, is almost a tool to express the music.

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