Comedian, musician, and actor Jaboukie Young-White on wandering and exploring

(I'm not entirely sure if this is the right community to post this in, but I thought it fit. If it doesn't, please let me know)

Some highlights from the interview:

In stand-up, you do a bunch of intellectual labor to get a reaction out of people, whereas I’ve gone to concerts, and musicians will, in between songs, be like, “Water,” and everyone’s going crazy, dying laughing, and I’m like, “This room is so hot right now. If I could do a tight five, it would crush so hard.”

Now that I’m doing music, I see why, now, being a comedian would be so enticing, because to be a musician now, you have to be a comedian. You’ve got to post content. Music videos are going in a more Ludacris, Busta Rhymes sort of direction where it’s absurd, a little comical.

Increasingly, I’ve been trying to find alternatives to existing in digital spaces, or at least trying to figure out some sort of hybrid, because the internet I experienced as a young person is gone. The community, freeness, weirdness, and cross-pollination of that is something I want to recreate in my own work and the spaces I create.

A joke includes inherently tight word economy. It’s efficient. It’s almost like math.

When it comes to lyrics, the same rules apply, but there’s a little more room to wander and be more fluid, loose, and abstract. I think that released the pressure I was feeling with stand-up, where I’ve cultivated this voice and this way of speaking, and I like it, but I don’t think it can necessarily hold everything I want to say.