ADS:  No, I don't. I believe that art is political, I believe I'm political.  And that's not what I'm talking about; I think the fact that I try to attract attention about political issues is really political. I keep doing something . . . we could be—you, too—we could all be doing something else. But what I do think of it no more than the . . . (knocking on the table as a door) as the beginning of the theater, that's all I see in what I'm doing—a call and then hopefully there will be activity around it, flurries of activity around it. And that sometimes it can empower people, other people who wouldn't have been empowered before. Or I can attract attention for them, that's the best-case scenario. But that's it. If anything, there could be a problem like, "Well, why did you attract attention for more than your own?" I hope that's a short-lived suspicion. You know what I mean?  

AA:  Well, you said—and I don't remember where, I think you said during your last performance in Cambridge—that about "Twilight" specifically, the leader, or one of the leaders, of the Crips, that you wanted his voice to be heard. Why is that? Why do you think his voice is important? As an issue of empowerment of him? Or empowerment of the rest of us— 

ADS:   I don't think I said that; I think I said it in the light of just trying to figure out an answer, and I can answer yes, a certain piece drew this issue that Barbara Johnson raised about me and public figures and why it is, for example, that very few are in "Twilight," and what's the problem with performing public figures. I don't know the answer to that, but I was saying that there is also a degree to which it's maybe easier for me to do people who are not public figures, because my advocacy of them is very, very clear. A public figure does not need my advocacy. And they make that very clear in the interview. They are very good at rephrasing questions, of gaining authorship, and so they don't need me there. But there are other people who I think have very interesting voices who are less heard, and also they're very interesting as human beings because it's more likely in an interview that they will go through the process of gaining more authorship in front of me. They don't come in in authorship; they come in thinking it's a conversation, and ultimately, they say things like, you know, Elvira talking about the earrings at so forth. 

Twilight in particular is a very brilliant person—who knows he's brilliant.  He doesn't need me to tell him that. He's a very, very, very brilliant man who can speak very complex thoughts. Most people can't. If I gave his text to most of my acting students, it would take them the whole term—if I didn't let them hear his voice—it would take them the whole term to figure out how to say that and make it sound natural. It would sound like Shakespeare or poetry, and it would just make us feel awkward. It wouldn't sound real. And his brain is a poem, and he has the ability to speak it, the way we go to school for four years to learn to do, as Shakespeare to speak the speech, speak it. It's very hard. And so the reason I want to speak Twilight is probably not just this thing of me being the person that goes out and makes his voice heard. It's not that. It's that I get—because somebody like Twilight is alive—I get to talk that way. I get to do that organic thing. It's just like finding a jewel in nature, that's what I want; it's less likely these days that you're going to find that kind of jewelry in public figures because they have to speak so much with a kind of self-consciousness, and he's got a kind of lack of that. At the  end, when he said that stuff to me, which was my second 

KLF:  Did you encounter any degree of resistance on his part, like the kind you encountered with Sista Solja? 

ADS:  No, but that's different with Sista Solja; that's not fair, that's a little bit misquoted, too. My people called Solja, and she had some problems with doing an interview. Somebody said to her, "Have you met Anna?" and she said, "Oh, yeah, she's the sister who wants to take my words." And whenever I've quoted that, I've quoted it in the context of thinking that's an incredibly savvy way to look at what I am doing. 

AA:  Savvy? 

ADS:  Yeah, because it's more than savvy. It's deeper—no, it's good. It's a good way to take it, because it means to me that Solja values words that she says. And a lot of people just tell me things, like talk is cheap, but it's the opposite for her. It's that her words mean something to her, and that's what I'm reading into it. And then if this other person comes and takes them, that means something else. And I think that's a very interesting way to look at it; in a peculiar way, I'm very flattered that she says that about it because there's  a way in which she's taking me seriously. 

KLF:  It's very interesting that you find that context missing in a lot of what I've read in terms of the context of what she was saying, and what that was really about. 

ADS:  Right. And I always kept giving the full context. I've always given it in the context of how my awareness of how much must be going on in rap culture that the word is all the word is, the word has power in a society where we're just throwing words around. And where she got in a lot of trouble for saying something, and many of us were asked "What did you think about what Sister Solja said?" And I was on a panel with her where the idea was "Oh, come on, Solja! Look, after all, you were on the cover of Newsweek!" And she said, "I was on the cover of Newsweek because I am confronting a powerful white man." 

AA:  She's really pretty amazing. I saw her wrap circles around a man who I thought was the most articulate man I've ever heard, and she wrapped him up with a bow and threw him away.