Let me tell you something… If you’re anybody – not just me, but anybody – and you can put an oven that doesn’t work at all on eBay and sign your name on it and sell it for 1200 bucks, and somebody will drive from Seattle to Dallas, Texas, to get it, that’s pretty cool.
I know how I shop and how I am inspired to buy things, and the majority of it is from Instagram. I look at people like Yasmin Sewell and Leandra Medine from the Man Repeller, as well as the countless models that have really cool street style, for inspiration all the time.
I remember once acting really cool on a bus with this girl named Stephanie. When I got home, I realized that I had a really big zit on my forehead. If you have acne problems, you really shouldn’t be acting like Don Juan. I should have been contrite – and apologized for exposing her to the angry pimple.
My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn’t cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.
The cool thing about Snapchat is you can get a lot of news on there now. There’s CNN, ESPN, and I find myself reading the most random articles. I don’t know how it actually benefits me, but it’s interesting. I like to stay up on current events, so I have to give kudos to Snapchat: they’ve done a good job of that. But I’m on there way too much.
When I talk about rock n’ roll, to me, that goes back to the beginning of the 1950s. Blue suede shoes and sideburns, man. Pink and black coloured clothes. Turn your collar up, comb your hair in ducktails. And the music was cool. It was a whole culture then – a different world.
In everyday life, I’m pretty much T-shirt and jeans guy – a soft LnA shirt, cool APC jeans, Nikes or Jordans. If I’m going to an event I like to wear a suit, sometimes a three-piece. I’m into brands like Simon Spurr – I think he makes great suits – and Dior Homme.
I started rocking and rolling when Guns N’ Roses came out. It wasn’t until Garth Brooks came around that I really got back to country. He made it fun again. To me, in country music, the rigor mortis was setting in and it just wasn’t fun anymore. Garth brought everyone back over to country and made it cool again.
I really love laser-cutting. I do a lot of laser-cut jewelry and laser-etched stationery. I’ll even etch my food sometimes. You can download an image online and etch it onto a tortilla or a brownie. It’s so cool to meld the digital and analog worlds together.
Because the cool thing about media and the online world nowadays is that anyone can do it. Whereas I think through traditional media, if you have something that you want to create, you have to know the right people and get a little bit lucky as well.
I really wanted to do something positive on the Internet. I wanted to try to get young people talking about, thinking about, life’s big questions-make it cool and OK to wonder about the heart, the soul and free will and God and death and big topics like that, big human topics.
I’ve never really wanted to do the bra top or booty shorts at festivals. I’d rather be cool, casual, and comfortable, and I like wearing outfits that I can also walk on the street with. In short, I don’t really dress differently at festivals.
You want to be taken seriously as an artist and not just known as ‘that girl wrestler who sings.’ So you want to go out and stand on your own legs. But at the same time, I don’t negate the fact that without everything I’ve accomplished in wrestling, I wouldn’t have been given so many really cool opportunities on the music side.
I wanted to be like some of the other young ladies that were in my school. I used to get picked on in church. Nobody wants to hang out with me. I want to hang out with the cool girls, and I started to take the wrong turn and do things I knew wasn’t right.
I started training wrestling in the pre-social media era and I was very cautious – I thought, ‘I can’t have people know my real last name.’ So I changed my last name to End because I always called myself ‘The End.’ I thought that was cool. I thought I’d take my real first name and my ‘fake’ last name, and that’s how I came up with Tommy End.
I enjoyed dancing with the Hardy Boyz back in the day. We did a lot of stuff at the house shows, dancing with Eddy Guerrero, and I think I had Mark Henry dancing as well. Kurt Angle danced. There were a lot of people who enjoyed that part of the magic of Rikishi and Too Cool.
I saw this cool interview with Amy Adams from when she did ‘Enchanted’ and played a princess, and when kids came up to her with no make-up and ripped jeans on, she said, ‘I’m off duty. I’m an off-duty princess’, and I thought that was quite sweet.
One thing that I always loved about, say, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, is that Indiana Jones gets the Ark of the Covenant about sixty percent of the way through the movie. And then the rest of it is get-out-alive. To me, that’s really cool. Because he’s the one you care about at the end of the day.
Standing up for what you believe is right, as well as standing up for what you believe is funny, standing up for what you believe is cool. As we found each other and the music that we do, we get to live out all of those things. That’s what Run The Jewels is: it’s all of those aspects of our personality.
When you think of technological revolution, you probably think of geeks in cool coastal spaces like the Google campus, or perhaps of math wizards on Wall Street. But one source of rural prosperity is the adoption of radical new technologies – and a consequent surge in productivity.
I love my bubble skirt. I wear it with a belt and my shirt tucked in. Just like a t-shirt from Nordstrom’s or something. And I wear this navy blue blazer with the sleeves crushed up. And I just feel like I’m such a cool girl when I walk out. I feel like, ‘Yeah I’m cool, like a model.’
It’s really cool to see how many people try to imitate me or wear my stuff. I get a lot of Instagram videos of people doing my entrance. I think that’s so cool. To see the variety of people, little girls, guys, doing it. I never really thought that would happen. It’s amazing.
I’d love to be an artist that’s multifaceted. At the moment, I am not. But wouldn’t that be cool if I was like, ‘Yeah, let me pull out my guitar and play you a song.’ I would adore that. I am so far not gifted in that way. But I am a very hard worker and a very determined person, so who knows?
I was 11 and watching soap operas with my mom, and I thought it would be cool to be an actor. I thought soap operas was going to be the dream at the time – it’s obviously now not the dream, but I think soap operas are really cool. Maybe I’ll go back to that.
New diseases like SARS and bird flu cause anxiety in the community. People get worried, some to the extent that it even affects their health. You feel very sad, and yet you must carry on and maintain your cool in very trying and difficult moments. You have to tough it out.
