as I loved all those artists, as much as I saw their genius, the fact of the matter is that for a while, there was only Prince. It may be hard for ki… - Questlove

That’s one thing about being creative. Don’t be too set in your own ways. Be suggestible from time to time. Allow unexpected influences (like Torr) to shift your ideas. You can always come back to your own convictions if they’re real. But be a tourist in other perspectives.

Sometimes I think I’m restrained by information — that I’m too focused on the finer points of things, too detail-minded, unable to free myself from the hold of other people’s work.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.