I mean, there's a hell of a lot of grounds for protest, but you don't do it through music.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I'm not going.
Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.
You can't just sit around and make protest albums all your life; eventually it comes to the point where you have to do something.
Early in my career, people wanted to hear music about protest, about trying to change things.
It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.
The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.
Hip hop is the strongest form of protest there is, and it doesn't always have to be a violent protest. It can be romantic, also. When you listen to Kanye West's 'Street Lights' for example, there's romance, there's pain - you feel the essence. I get the same thing from Drake and 2 Chainz.
I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.
I do the protest stuff. I do country and western. I play both acoustic and electric guitar in a lot of different styles, from loud, psychedelic stuff to quiet finger-picking.
Protest is patriotic. Since the beginning of musical time, American singers and songwriters have used their talent and bully pulpits to show us America's strengths and shortcomings.