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I'm there interviewing Ice Cube with a tape recorder and later I'm transcribing it and it turned out, he doesn't take notes during interviews. He does it all by memory. But I always thought it was some sort of ethics violation, I thought you always had to keep notes, notes were real important and tapes were real important, and he just had a real good memory. Besides, he's Roger Ebert, who's gonna challenge him? He's so powerful. I take notes, but what I'll usually do, a lot of the times I'll have a tape, so just in case the person says they're gay I can prove it, but I rarely ever go back to it. I take notes. So, what were we talking about?

Writing, when you were in the fifth grade.

So, what happened was, the teacher would read these poems I'd write about my classmates, and a lot of them would just be making fun of everybody. I was thinking this might have been where my style started, as far as putting things in a humorous context. So I did that for a while, then I started writing real sensitive poems in the school newspaper, "The Rumble," The Punishment," "The Ghetto." They were socially conscious poems about why we were spending all this money on the space program when there were people in the ghetto. I first started to become a music critic when I was eighteen. There was kind of a biweekly as possible publication called Sunbums in Hawaii It was owned by a concert promoter. I started doing concert reviews because that was the focus of the whole paper. It was, like I said, owned by a concert promoter, so he used the paper to promote his own business. I really liked doing the concert reviews because you got in free and I was really into going to concerts at the time. When I was 18 or 19, that was like the biggest thing in the world, was going to a rock concert. That was like heaven. so that pretty much started me in music criticism, even though I really wanted ti be a sportswriter when I was growing up. My main love is probably sports, more than music. I love the Cowboys more than any band. Except maybe Oasis. A lot of my writing style comes from sportswriting, like the real heavy use of metaphors, the colorful language of sportswriters. I was also really influenced by standup comedians on the Tonight Show. When I was a kid, I watched the Tonight Show every single night, and so I think I learned a lot about rhythm as far as that goes. You know, the first thing's the set-up, the second thing's the follow-up, the third thing's the joke. There's certain rhythms that I use in stand-up comedy. Because I'm not a musical expert at all, in fact, I think one of the things I've been able to do is turn my minutes into