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Corporations, consumers, and citizens must begin acting in concert to create a powerful third pillar of social transformation if we hope to meet the social challenges we currently face with equal force. This begins with corporations that choose to alter how they practice capitalism in two ways to serve the greater good.
Who do you know, who could come out on a flying carpet? P. Diddy standing at the bottom, come out like a concert, dancing, oozing confidence, and then get in and take somebody out? Come on, do you know anybody in the history of the sport that did what Prince Naseem did? I ain't trying to brag, but I was bloody good at it.
There was once this viral photo of the Pope doing his Pope-mobile parade, and everyone had their phones up. But there was this one old woman looking over the fence so beautifully at him. She was totally in the moment. For me, then, I think there shouldn't be any phones at a Pope-mobile situation - or at a Beyonce concert.
The difference between what all the people can do individually and the global consumption of nonrenewable resources is huge. The tension is... what will it take to get people to act in concert? There isn't any additive solution to the problem. It will be both governmental and social because that's the scale of the problem.
I've been really fortunate that my concert career has taken off hugely. I can make a living. I enjoy performing in front of a live audience, and I can do something different every time. Sometimes I'm with a quartet, sometimes I'm solo, sometimes with a symphony, and I get to go to different cities and meet different people.
When I was younger, I felt it essential to see every movie ever made. Now I feel as though I've got to read every book, see every art show, watch every play and opera and concert and so on. It does not end, and of course there is truth in the old cliche that the more one knows, the more one realizes one knows nothing at all.
There's such a currency to Led Zeppelin, or the members of Led Zeppelin. If I put it to you this way, on the run-up to the O2 concert, the only music that we played was music of Led Zeppelin - the past catalog stuff; that's what we played on the way towards shaping up the set list for that. But we played really, really well.
I once won a second prize in a history concert. My parents came to the ceremony. Somebody else had won the prize for best all-around student. Afterwards my father said to me, 'Never, ever disgrace me like that again.' When I tell my Western friends, they are aghast. But I adore my father. It didn't knock my self-esteem at all.
When I was in Cardiff, playing with the National Orchestra of Wales, they said they get letters from people complaining if they're smiling during the concert. Nuts, isn't it? As if you have to respect the solemnity of the music by not smiling. Music is this joyful thing that enriches our lives, and you're not supposed to smile?
When a fan buys a ticket, we learn an enormous amount about them: What bands they like, where they live, how much they are willing to spend. Someday, a fan will be sitting in a bar and his cellphone will text message 'Sonic Youth are playing tonight. Do you want to go?' He'll buy his ticket over the phone and walk to the concert.
I'd still stand in line all day to get into an AC/DC show, because that was the one show when I was younger that kind of changed my life. Because it was a little wrong. I think I was 14 or 15, first concert without the parents, you know, and they were all worried because we were going to an AC/DC show, and it was an amphitheater.
'A Little Nightmare Music' is the first show we created. It's about all the nightmares that can happen in the span of a concert. When things go wrong - when the lights go out or a cellphone rings - that's when an audience suddenly comes alive, wondering what's going to happen next. Things going wrong often leads to something good.
The Islamic State does not want us to open our doors to their refugees. It wants them to be hopeless and desperate. It does not want us to enjoy ourselves with our families and friends in bars and concert halls, stadiums and restaurants. It wants us to huddle in our houses, within our own social groups, and close our doors in fear.
I like What Goes Around Comes Around for old concert tees. Oh man, I got this 'Sgt. Pepper' cartoon Beatles shirt there; it was, like, $300. I didn't even know how much it cost - I thought it was gonna be, like, $80 at most - till I got to the register and was like, 'Oh mah gawd!' Good Lord. But it's classic vintage rock, you know?
I know that the classical world has resisted film composers throwing their hat into the classical concert music ring. And you know I don't think that's totally without justification. I think sometimes it seems to me there is a built in automatic prejudice against the whole idea of it. And it's very difficult to overcome that stigma.
I won't lie, I didn't know there was a concert. I've always known about the Nobel Peace Prize and the different prizes given out for science and this and that, but I didn't know there was a concert the day after. When they said, 'You're going to perform in Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize concert,' I was like, 'All right, I'm there.'
I was actually going to work at Tokyo Disney. I thought, 'I'll work in the family!' That was my postgraduate plan. I didn't really have any plans lined up, but I was going to audition for this big band jazz show that was at Tokyo Disney. I think the concert was, like, for a year or something, and I thought, 'Yeah, that's what I'll do!'
I had just left Yes and had done a concert at Crystal Palace, South London, with a choir and orchestra playing my solo album 'Journey To The Centre Of The Earth' when I had my heart attack. That day, I hadn't been to bed for four days. I don't remember much. I felt very numb during the day and airy, which is the best way to describe it.
My dad's also a musician, so jazz was always around the house. When I was 11, I developed an interest in it, and he took me to Leimert Park. At that time, it was the artistic hub of L.A., and it was right in South Central. The first concert I went to, I saw Pharoah Sanders at the World Stage club there, which only holds, like, 30 people.
The very first concert I ever went to was a Green Day concert when I was 12 years old, at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Ont., and I remember right after seeing them perform I started a band, and I wanted to get up in front of people and start performing. Ten years later, to be on the Green Day 'American Idiot' tour is really awesome.
When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn't a big, 'John Carter of Mars' type failure. It wasn't dramatic; it was just depressing.
Concert pianists are really afraid to try out the Beethoven Fourth Concerto if the Third happens to be their specialty. That's the piece they had such success with on Long Island, by George, and it will surely bring them success in Connecticut. So first there's tremendous conservatism. And then stagnation sets in. Or it certainly did in me.
If you arrive at a concert ready to play your piece, that's not nearly good enough. You must have your music ready to the point where you can play it on a short rehearsal, after a long plane flight, on a strange piano, having had an unpleasant lunch, in an unfriendly atmosphere. You have to be so over-prepared that you can cope with anything.
To me, in life, if there's, like, a rule, and I think it's ridiculous, then of course I'll circumvent that but also point out how ridiculous the rule is. Other than that, if I go to a concert, and my seat is Row G, Seat 12, I'm sitting in Row G, Seat 12. I don't care if I'm with five other friends, I'm supposed to be in Seat 12, that's my seat.
When we go and play live... we go and we work with like different organizations: the food banks, homeless shelters, children's hospitals or different homes that are reaching out to people. And just to actually go and say, 'Hey, don't just hear me play, come to my concert, that's it, hope you have a good night.' It's like, 'Hey, come be a part.'
I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'
