Growing up in Houston, the music scene is super boring.

I was working with Jay Z while I was still learning how to be who I was about to become.

I never produce a song, whether writing it or making a beat, and give it a wack visual or wack performance. I'm like a trifecta.

I see hip-hop as going in a self-managing place. It's very culturally controlled and artist-controlled. It's not really based on a label anymore. Everything is pretty much in the control of the artist. Which is amazing.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

If anyone can figure out how to balance my celebrity and my dual careers in music and film, it's me. I don't feel frightened; I feel challenged.

In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood, to give them their due, always called it the industry, through quite a few imagined it as an art form and went through several hours regularly at tiresome films in the sacred cause of art.

My main object is to write, to keep learning. I always try to perfect my composition. But I do like writing film and opera music. I believe that it fulfills the needs of particular situations.