After the first three or four years of me taking rap seriously, it started to look more promising. I started booking shows and more people were playing my music, so I starting believing this could actually work for me.
I think I was 10 when I did my first community play, and then I started booking bigger roles in these plays, and people were telling me and my parents that I was talented. And I was like, 'Well, this is something I wanna do.'
I'm so flattered that at 69, people are booking me and finding me on Instagram.
Now and again I'll bump into people and say, ‘I'm a big fan of yours. Would you like to be in my sitcom?' And they say, ‘Oh yes,' but when it comes to the booking, they don't want to do it.
I had to turn social media off. It was just crazy. Just to see the messages rolling through and people shouting, 'Till beat Tyron,' booking flights and booking hotels, that's becoming the norm right now.
The power of a label and radio and a booking agency and all that - you never know until you experience it the first time, but being able to have a song on radio, but then go play a show for people that have heard the song on radio, and having it sung back to you, is - I don't know how to describe it.
I have on my bookshelf a series of books with opposite titles: 'The Alpha Strategy' and the 'Omega Strategy'; 'Asia Rising' and 'Asia Falling'; 'Free to Choose' and 'Free to Lose'; 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' and 'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.' Visitors love the collection.
While a lot of management development books try to teach you a lesson or give you a scenario of what corporate culture and work practices are about, they're theoretical and written in a sermonizing way. Most people don't get past the first chapter, and they just look nice on the bookshelf.
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.
The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.
Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark.
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
I think the Baby Boom does have a tendency to get its nose in everything. The Greatest Generation had a better tendency to leave people alone. Of course, they also had a better tendency to hate everybody's guts.
When I work, a lot of times I have to lose weight, and I do that, but in my regular life I was not eating right, and I was not getting enough exercise. But by the nature of my diet and that lifestyle - boom! The end result was high blood sugars that reach the levels where it becomes Type 2 diabetes. I share that with a gajillion other people.
Everyone's supposed to stay in their lines and be neat. 'You're a rapper. You're supposed to rap, carry a boom box, wear chains, and go to the club - that's all you do. What are you doing collecting art? What are you talking about? Wait a minute, you're getting out of the zone.' People hate when people cross lines.
People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.
I learned most of what I knew about online communities on The Well, and it was a good place to learn. The group of people in Sausalito and Bolinas who'd gotten the Whole Earth Catalog off the ground - a bunch of boomer hippies, intellectuals and nerds - established the 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link', and showed us what online communities were.
