Acting is about finding truth and finding the way to convey the truth.
Daveed Diggs
I have a recognizable silhouette.
Being an emcee onstage is mostly about crowd control, about monitoring energy levels.
As more doors open for me, I try to always bring people who I know through.
I feel like, anytime I'm onstage, I tend to feel very connected with people in the audience or with the sort of heartbeat or tempo of the audience.
I can jump really high, yeah. I'm proud of that. I'll take it.
At some point, I'll do more McDonald's commercials if I have to.
Writing is writing. It is all about telling stories, and I've been doing that for so long, in all realms, that it all feels like the same thing to me anyway.
I felt so loved and taken care of, and that's a huge part of the reason I'm able to do what I do.
That's what hip-hop is - it's about meeting the music where you are, and then you add on top of that. It's about coming at it with your full self.
The fact that rap has a strict meter and stays to a click means that you have to make your thoughts concise.
I was really aware, even while it was happening, that the discovery of arts education in my life sort of saved my life.
History is about who tells it.
I've always been very supported. I've never really been sad. I've just been broke. They are very different things.
The reason you write something that is exciting and visceral is to force people to hear what you have to say, especially if you're in any kind of marginalized community where people don't want to listen. You have to come up with tricks to make them listen.
Clipping is a very specific, concept-y thing. We have all these rules: we don't sample drums. We create all our own sounds. I don't speak in the first person. We come from a background of experimental music like John Cage... Philip Glass.
It wasn't until I got out in the world and started worked professionally when I realized that the people I admired were the ones who had taken the little snippets of what they learned that worked for them - and strung them together in their own technique.
I have all of Kendrick Lamar on vinyl.
I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.
Using something that is really painful, generally, as the percussive element for a beat, I think is cool.
I warm up a lot harder for a Clipping show than I ever did for 'Hamilton.'
College was the first time I felt I really had to choose who my friends were.
Neither of my parents live in Oakland anymore. They both got priced out.
I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.
There's this thing about authenticity when you rap, right? Whether or not it's real, it has to feel real.
I went to Hebrew school but opted out of a bar mitzvah.
I've always been a fan of 'Black-ish.'
As a kid, I was very shy.
My mom is a white Jewish lady, and my dad is black. The cultures never seemed separate - I had a lot of mixed friends. When I was young, I identified with being Jewish, but I embraced my dad's side, too.
If a project feels good to you, say yes. And do it with everything that you have and hope that the outcome is good.
Oftentimes, it feels like we spend so much of our life waiting to make art, waiting for somebody to let us do something. You don't really have to do that. You can make it all the time. And 99 percent of the time, it's not going to be a big deal on a global scale. But 100 percent of the time, it's going to make you feel amazing.
I'm an artist, so days don't start on any regular time.
Learning how to get a point across is pretty useful in any situation.
Being on stage, I know my function. I just do the thing.
What writing a poem really does - and what figuring how to perform effectively really does - is forces people to listen to you. It frames your thoughts in such a way that grabs people's attentions and forces them to hear the things that you're actually saying.
I liked being on stage because it gave me a reason to be around people. The other great thing about acting is it allows you to imagine circumstances different from your own. I was a poor Bay Area kid getting to pretend to be a Russian aristocrat.
Typically, my advice to young artists is not to wait for someone to allow you to do the thing. Just do the thing, and they'll catch up.
I miss doing a straight play.
I call myself a nerd all the time.
We're very used to seeing a huge diversity of white people. You never just expect two white people on TV to feel the same way.
I love that 'Black-ish' is a pretty traditional sitcom, structurally. It functions like the sitcoms from the '80s and '90s that I grew up with.
I have this thing. I can rap really fast. I can rap really, really fast. It's a thing I'm good at and I've trained myself to do; it's a thing I do in the Bay Area.
Everybody from the Bay has a superiority complex because we're dope.
TV is really about keeping things fresh and making sure you have the most energy possible for these very short spurts of time.
I get to say 'no' to a lot of things. That, for an artist, is crazy.
I make the energy to go out. You can't let the Broadway schedule run you.
I think rappers spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is new. 'How can I say this in a way that no one has ever said it before?'
I sort of have this feeling about change in general. We can make baby steps on a macro level. We can try to shift policy, voting and changing who's in office. But we can make huge, sweeping changes on a personal level and in your immediate circle, or just the people around you.
Often, the people I'm working with on music are separate from the rest of my life.
There's a lot of spaces that care about what kids are buying. There are a lot of spaces that care about what kids are watching. But there aren't a lot of spaces that care about what kids are saying.
