When I was younger there was the mainstream and the maverick, and there was a real difference between us. Right now in America, we're a nation of disenfranchised people. All of us are victims, no matter if we're right wing or left wing, of the terrible mistakes of the Bush administration -- whether it's because of the atmosphere he has produced globally, the loss of Iraqi citizens' life and infrastructure, the loss of American life, the abandonment of New Orleans, the deterioration of our environment. And economically the country is heading for a fall.

I think rock 'n' roll is more valuable as an acceptable form of communication because we don't need some cool, hip thing that only a few people understand or communicate about: We need global action. We need a voice. The new generation is communicating, deciding how they're going to receive and send music [on the Web], and the next step is to inject content into it. And they will do that, because things are just going to get worse and worse and people will react. I don't think the new generations are going to be like Nero and fiddle while Rome burns. I think that people are going to step up. It's just that people are finding each other, finding their voice and figuring out how to process all the information around them.