- I don't know why people think we're intimidating. I think one person said imposing - the music was too imposing for them.
- A certain politically conscious mindset among musicians appears to have been deleted somewhere along the line. [compares it to the way that people no longer automatically think of joining trade unions]
- [on getting stick from his peers for attending Lickshot, the alcohol-free hip hop night, when he was 14] They'd say, 'What, do you think you're black now?' I'd grown up with a certain group of boys and even when I was very young, if I ever went and hung around with someone else for a day, it would be like, 'Oh, you f***ing sneakaway,' and you'd get a dead arm. At discos, no one would dance - everyone just ran around punching each other's arms because they couldnae deal with emotion! I never understood that mentality. My dad told me he'd never had a fight in his life. So I was brought up differently.
- [What do you think pop can achieve that alternative music can't?] In our mindset, the ideal situation is that the people who run radio and TV change their version of 'pop' to a broader spectrum. Pop music and pop culture in general doesnae represent the people that it's playing to. People who think that doesn't matter are clueless. People that run radio and TV have a duty to society to portray society in its purest kind of way.
- [Do you think that there's a subtext when people say Young Fathers' music is too difficult?] Yes, it's saying, 'You're different.' Pop is in a difficult place right now because the main outlets are saying, 'Well, there's the internet now. We don't need to represent the whole of culture as it really is.' But they do - because there's a whole load of people who dinnae look for music, it's just the noise that fills the break. But it does affect you. It is important. Even if you hate a band, just to know they exist is something in itself, even if you turn the radio off as soon as you hear them. The people that don't want to hear us are the ones we want to play to the most. I want to play to everybody. I want to play to the woman driving home from work and the kids who just listen to mainstream rap. And racists, I want them to hear us. Because how do you change things unless you're attacking them in a non-violent way?
- [on their album title White Men Are Black Men Too] It is a confusing statement on purpose. The media like to put whole colours, races and religions into little boxes which are completely inaccurate. As a band, just standing onstage, we represent that, even before we've sung a note. [The title touches on our feelings] about how things are portrayed in the media - the way a Muslim is represented, for example, is disgusting in a lot of ways and untrue and unfair. The title is just a space to spark people thinking, a bit of situationism. The radio presenter has to mention it, the guy on TV has to mention it. The world is unequal and it's putting something like that forward which helps the conversation.
- We weren't into the other side of hip hop - everyone being angry and calling each other faggots the whole time. We hated the aggression. Because we knew the guys who were doing it and it was all fake, it was all emulated. Most of them were middle-class boys. Hip hop was seen as rebellion.
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