Days are getting fresher, and everybody knows hip-hop artists love that; Sage Francis is an hip-hop artist, he thus decided to make a few shows in Arizona, just to feel what it’s like here; his journey ended in Tempe, and as hunger started pointing its nose in Sage’s stomach, we went to a Sushi bar to talk about his past, present and future around a cup of green tea for him, and lemonade for me…
First Thing, Can you introduce yourself to us quickly ?
Hi, my name is Sage Francis.
That was quick…
That’s all I am…
So, how do you situate yourself in hip-hop ?
I just involved myself at a very young age, I stayed involved the whole time, since the age of eight, I’ve written and recorded and explored all aspects of what people considered hip-hop to be, and I absorbed it, I wanted to be a part of it and it all happened pretty quickly, it was just an effort of mind to make something of my own out of it, and make my own special contribution to this thing that had basically been like a surrogate parent to me; it was simple as that, it doesn’t take much, it doesn’t mean you need a record deal to be situated…
That’s why you decided to release all this material independently…
Yeah, for the most part, I have a self made career, I did all my own tapes, found my own producers… I started making production of my own, but I eventually came across people who could actually produce better than me, such as Joe Beats, so we worked together, and I worked with a band, and just, you know, you explore all the avenues, and find out what works best for you, so I think I did that pretty well, and it got me where I am now, so I don’t have to work, 9 to 5 at least…
You had a lot of producers on Personal Journals, and…
Well, Personal Journals was an Anticon project, so Sole was able to offer me a lot of production from the “Anticon Camp”, a lot of the producers who are affiliated to Anticon made contributions, and I figured that I would make use of all that, I think it was too good just because of the different styles of music from them, and to do my best to push them to make sure they were not giving me scraps, and so I shuffled through a few of the contributions they made and I came up with the one that I felt would fit the mood of the album I wanted and it worked out.
So what’s the connection between Sage Francis and Anticon ?
Well, there’s a few connections, one is they put out my album, that’s probably the most major connection that will ever be made between me and them, because that’s the one that goes down in the books, and it’s my first personal commercial release, and Anticon is the first collective of people that offered a helping hand to Sage Francis – I speak in the third person, because, you know, I’m just speaking of the art, the artist. I grew up in New England which is where they originally come from, Sole, Alias and a couple of the other people who were around when it first started, so we have similar origins, as far as when we came up, and the same thing that we had to deal with… After they already established themselves and I already established myself, we collaborated, and we headed off as people, we made sense to each other, and we enjoyed each other’s company, that’s all we needed really, I think we complemented each other’s art, and made something out of it.
That’s why you came to do more extensive work with Buck 65 for example ?
Buck 65 is a different story, it’s difficult to say really…it’s because, we worked together three years ago, we recorded together, and his Vertex album blew my mind when I first listened to it, I just couldn’t stop listening to it, it was stuck in my tape deck for at least a year, and I’m neurotic as hell, so it means that everyday I would listen to it, at least until my car radio broke; he just opened me up to the whole “you-don’t-need-a-chorus-in-a-song” thing… it’s basic shit, but he’s the first person I heard to really put it off correctly, he was doing his own producing, his own scratching, so I just have a lot of admiration for him, and tons of respect, it wasn’t an Anticon thing, and he isn’t really associated with Anticon anymore, it’s just there is mutual respect there, between him and I… and I’d love to do more things with him, I think that our styles really complete each other’s and he’s a real cool guy.
Do you think that the fact that Personal Journals was put out on Anticon had a greater impact on people’s mind, like, it’s not just a Sage Francis album, it’s a Sage Francis album on Anticon ?
No, I don’t think it had more of an impact at all, it’s just the fact that a Sage Francis album was available in stores, it was my first commercial release, and first real album : mostly studio tracks, which is what a lot of people were really waiting for, and that was my first major strike, against the music world, it solidified me as a recording artist, and ensured that I would be coming back with more stuff, and people knew at that point that “no, he’s not just a fashion phenomenon” because I had been releasing music for a few years, I had been winning battles, and winning poetry contests, and just involving myself in a lot of stuff, that was getting me a bit of recognition, but you have to up the ante at some point, and that’s’ what Personal Journals did, and I happy to contribute with an Anticon release, because I think they opened up the doors for what people like me are doing, and even though they’re catching a lot of slack nowadays, and they have been for a couple of years now, I can’t front on the fact that they kicked doors open, and made the music a little bit more accessible to the public…
Why take so long to release something official ?
I just wanted to make sure it went through the right avenues and I definitely wasn’t interested in wasting any efforts, by spending two years compiling an album that I like very much and not letting it have the accessibility it needs to the ‘buying public’. I could have done it five or ten years ago… I remember being twelve and I marked down this moment into my memory, saying ‘ I can do an album right now, I have enough material ready to do an album’ and I’m glad I didn’t do it you know, at the time I really wasn’t ready to, I wasn’t able to rap and I wasn’t able to put together songs, and that doesn’t constitute an album worth listening to… but through the years I kept cultivating myself, and my music, and I think I waited until the time was right, and I did it when the time was right; I don’t like forcing things, that’s why it takes two or three years to make an album, and that’s what I’m doing with the non-prophets album, it has been taking me a long time, but when it’s done I’m gonna be happy with it, just like I’m happy with Personal Journals, I don’t regret it at all, I’m very pleased with it… My first album was called Voicemail Bomb Threat in 97, and even that, a lot of the songs were written around 94-95, and it didn’t come out till three years later, because I didn’t have production up until that point and the band helped out, so we worked it with the band, and I wasn’t completely thrilled with the turnout of that album, but it was my first recording experience, and it gave me the opportunity to feel myself out in a studio, in a recording environment, and to familiarize me with how an album is put together, and much work goes into it, so I thought it was a wise move too, at the time, to explore those areas of music that I wasn’t previously comfortable with, so it was just to feel myself in the water and start to swim…
And is making battles and slam contests part of this building of confidence ?
Not really, those were more of a promotional tool, basically. I was already confident, I mean, I wouldn’t have been in a battle if I wasn’t arrogant enough to be in a battle. It is a different game nowadays, because I see people today who lack that confidence, that arrogance you need in a rap battle to win anyone’s attention. At that point, when you’re entering those big battles that are contrived, and you get judges and rules and all that bullshit, it’s really not much more than a promotional tool I win it, and I get a reason for people to say my name, and if you want to diss me afterwards and make songs about me, that’s just more publicity…
And the internet came to relay those battles and promotional tools ?
Yeah, I wasn’t really familiar with the internet until around 98, and everything snowballed from there… All I really needed was access to the public, and that’s what Internet really did for me, a huge promotional tool, and it allowed me to sell my music to people all over the world, it allowed people to access my music from all over the world, even if they won’t buy it; I attribute a lot of my success now to Napster, my commercial success, before Personal Journals came out, I was going to Sweden and Iceland and all parts of Europe, and that’s because people fuckin’ downloaded my shit, it’s not because my records were in their stores or anything, I guess it’s obvious that the music spoke for itself, the music sold itself and I benefited from that, so I kinda laugh at these major labels that are crying about the Internet, because all it does is help out independent artists, and it hurts the bullshit puppet artists who are on major labels trying to blow-up, and joke the public with, fuck all that, the internet has done us very well; it also has its downsides, but it’s just way too popular to hate on the internet, and I’m not gonna do it, I gotta give props to it.
Also on your forum, you’re using it as a direct communication tool, through your forum, or even instant messaging…
That’s what I need to do with all the travelling I’m doing, and I’m not very keen on using my phone… So I’ve set up all my shows via e-mail and if I make my email accessible to the public, that also means that promoters have my email, that also means that store owners have my email, they contact me, and distributors, everybody… I’m able to handle my own business, and nobody is gonna put that rug from under my feet, because it’s that small virtual empire I built with nothing more than an email and a website… I don’t even know how to build a website myself, much thanks go out to Harold in Rhode Island who phreaked it for me.
Do you also use the Internet to find new artists, just like people do for you ?
No I’m not using it that often, the only reason I usually go online is to check my email, which I do incessantly, and to maintain the website, but it’s not too often that I check other artists’ websites and I don’t really care that much about wasting my time online looking for someone who might not be good; I’m lucky enough to have lots of good friends with good tastes in music, and they offer me their expertise on shit that I don’t know; it doesn’t make much sense for me to surf the net for random shit, but that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t do it (wink)
Concerning your rapping, and your music, do you have a different approach to rap than the one you have for slam performances ?
It’s two completely different games, even if they’re both competitive, one of them is written based and much more literary, the other one is more comedy based and improvised content; I guess my energy is similar in both instances, I approach them the same way, with a slightly different mentality and it has done me well, I get a lot more out of poetry slams, even if it’s just as silly in the end, you know, you have people giving you scores for poetry, it’s kinda bullshit but trying to get props out of dissing someone else’s sexuality is much more dumb… So I kinda go in there and I don’t invest myself much into it I have fun with it, I do my best to present content that I think is worth people’s while, give people a reason to think and maybe question themselves and question me, you know that’s all I need to do, that’s all it comes down to.
I had the feeling that, the whole idea of Personal Journals, is for you to be a journalist, half way between rapping and slamming, between literature and improvisation…
The first thing is that I do consider myself a journalist, for different reasons : one, probably the least important, I studied journalism and I have my degree in Journalism at URI, and it sort of made me aware of the ethics to use when presenting information and ideas to people, so as not to come off as a propagandist and also not be dead pen, a fact boy. I offer a little bit of myself in all I give, my own truth is not a universal one all the time, but I think it’s something people can relate to, so for this whole ‘Personal Journals’ thing, I would hope people can listen to a lot of those songs and somehow feel in my place and really feel what exactly inspired the song; I wasn’t giving a lot of personal information out, much as it seems like I was, I wasn’t, and I was sort of hinting towards things and leaning towards things leaving open doorways for people to fill in the blanks, and that’s why a lot of people were able to identify with a lot thing that I said because it wasn’t hard for them to put themselves into the situation that I presented. A song that means something to me could have a slight twist wit for someone else, and they think that they understand the song the way I meant it to be perceived, well not the way I meant it to be perceived but the way I perceived it in my own mind, but no, I do leave those openings for people to make it their own and I think the process of someone interpreting a song that fits their own imagination is a very important aspect of writing and it gives people the opportunity to own something and to make it theirs, so that was the whole Personal Journals approach. I never really considered it to be really half-way between literary and improvised material it was just… I place things in categories, and those things don’t even sit next to where Personal Journals album writing exists, they’re basically surface items, superficial aspects of my life that I involved myself in, and I used them as forms to travel within. I don’t even invest myself in those silly games…
(ensues a short discussion on daily journalism)
I truly believe that music is journalistic in nature, or can be… and so is all art… there’s an expression taking place and something to be communicated, and there’s a purpose in it…
One song in this album that struck me, and probably struck most people is of course Makeshift Patriot, and this track is sort of processed as a chronicle…
That song was basically meant to make people question their environment, and what was happening around them, what was being presented to them by the popular media, because it was a hectic time… that song was written amidst very slantic media; some people don’t even figure out what I’m trying to say in that song because, really I’m no trying to make a clear point, I’m leaving a lot of questions out there, without any answers really… And that was important to do at that time because people thought they had it all figured out, just because they saw a picture of Bin Laden, and they saw buildings blowing up and then they came to their own conclusions, without even considering our history, and our involvement in this world – meaning ‘America’s’ – and this was the first song that I ever did, that took the knowledge I got in College, the journalistic training, and I put it to use to criticize media, and I was appalled by it, I saw a lot of rules being broken, it was in such a critical time, and I just couldn’t believe most of the things I was seeing, it just comes down to media stations, which are owned by the corporations that are benefiting from the oil that will be attained through war and through our involvement in these Middle Eastern countries, and that’s why we are getting all the same information, and it’s bullshit, it’s a strange filter that America views the world through, and as until we crack it open, we the American people, who won’t accept that kind of media, and don’t settle for lest than more honest journalism, and more honest information coming from different sources and different angles… I forgot the point that I was making already… But Makeshift Patriot was a criticism of the media, and is continues to be a song that gets referenced to a lot, and I’m happy about that, but that wasn’t really my motive in making the song, it was just an urging piece of music that for the first time I thought was important to give out to the people and they can make they opinion on me all they want, I don’t care if they hated me or loved me, it was really the message that drove the music.
And, did you write Makeshift Patriot as an American, a Rhode Island resident, a human being, a journalist ?
I wrote it just as a frustrated human being; I was presented with a situation, and I just responded to it, and my response was unhappy and displeased with the media; and also the underlying discontent in my country about our involvement in the world, and the way people around me were reacting to the situation, it was a fuckin crazy time, there’s not two ways about it, I couldn’t sleep for three days I was stuck to the television that’s the only source of information, I couldn’t get it from anywhere else, it was on-the-spot news, and they’re telling me all this mess of opinions they were presenting as facts, and my song consists in reporter quotes you know? like, look how ridiculous this is! I hope it continues to get heard by people, and it’s just a reminder for people that they can’t take what reporters say at face value, they can’t take their view of the world out a school textbook and think that’s the only way you can know things… I went to ground zero, and I need this, I needed to absorb the atmosphere, and I somehow gained a greater understanding of the situation, and I travel all this foreign countries now, and I get their perspective of the world, and everyone has this fuckin poor opinion of America, and they think I’m the person to tell it to… No, I’m not the person they need to tell it to; and it’s basically preaching to the choir when you talk to me about how poor our country is as far as foreign relations are concerned. There’s more progressive ways and productive ways that Americans and non-Americans can deal with the situation, you can’t shut down our country by just dismissing the people who live within it, the citizens of America, as far as I am concerned, are unhappy with our situation, we didn’t vote this fuckin fool into office, people are walking around here feeling helpless, just as helpless as people anywhere else, and people who don’t feel helpless are fuckin ignorant, and that’s all there is to it; until they figure out that they don’t have the freedom they’ve been swearing by their whole life, then they are gonna get to that same conclusion, and I think that a lot of people are aware of that, and trying to figure out what we can do, but with our limited resources… We grow up on pop media, that’s how brainwashed all of us are… We grow up on pop movies, we grow up on television, and radio, music… until you break away from these and challenge these, it’s real difficult to open up people to the idea that things are really messed up.
For you, making music or hip-hop is then your way to express your political engagement...
It is, it’s the only thing I’ve done, really… I try to be proactive, I try to learn things and to keep up on current events… Music is the only therapy that I have for myself, and my only contribution I have for this world so far, it’s what I can offer of myself to everybody out there, and I try not to shut anybody out, I try to appeal to anybody who has an open ear and an open mind… That’s what music is for me, it keeps me out from the “9 to 5”, and that’s great; but even if I had to work, like when I did have a job, I’d still be making music, and I’d still be writing the stuff that I write… because it’s the only way I can breathe easy and sleep at night, I don’t understand even how these people can fuckin sleep at night.
I’ve read that you had a DVD project, is that a way for you to change the medium?
Not really, the DVD… out of all the years that I’ve been doing things, I’ve collected a lot of really funny video footage, and performances that I think are good of certain songs, and people who dig my music would probably enjoy seeing the visual aspect… I think it’s just gonna be this extra element added to what I do… I’ve never done a video, or anything visual like that, so it will be a brand new territory for me, the way my “sick of waiting…” CDs are compiled, that’s sort of how the DVD is gonna be, it’s gonna be a mix of very funny stuff, and serious stuff, and just who the fuck I am… It’s not too pretty but I think it’s fun watching, especially if you like the music; it might even attract an even bigger audience, who will be able to watch and see that, like: “oh ok, this dude is not just a studio artist”; I’m out and about in the world, and really; I believe in what I do and I think that comes too in the visual aspect, a lot more… If you come to a show, you see the music come to life, I’ll try to portray that in the DVD, maybe I will, maybe I won’t, I don’t fuckin know…
So I guess that most, if not all, of your inspiration comes from personal experience and everyday life, things you hear or you see…
Yeah, relationships I have with people and my experiences are all I can draw from, and … inspiration comes from everywhere, I can’t deny that; if I read a book, it might put me in a certain frame of mind, that opens me up to a certain mood, that brings about a certain concept… I can never really properly place my finger on what inspires me all the time, because it comes from so many different places, and they are intertwined and blended into each other… but basically it’s my interactions with people and the things I share with people, that’s where I draw my material from, that’s where my emotions derive from.
Then how do you come up with writing and then recording, when you see something, you just try to write it down at once and…
Aww, it comes through all different processes, sometimes a concept just sticks at the back of my mind, and…
The food arrives, we make a short pause.
I have thousands of unfinished verses in my notebooks, through the years, they just sit there… because inspiration strikes at certain moments, a lot of times when I’m driving or when I wake up in the morning, and I have this idea, that just keeps running through my head and then I write it down, but it does not always develop into a full verse and a verse does not always get included in a song; it’s just a lot of ideas hanging around and once they are linked together, that sometimes turn them into a song… other times, I have an idea, or a mood that’s so strong, and just the whole song just gets written right out…They result in all different songs, and you’ll notice that all my writing isn’t exactly the same, my style in song-writing, you can’t really put it in a box, because I haven’t stuck to a single formula, it’s a lot of these avenues I’ve travelled through the years of writing, you know… and what gets presented to the public goes through different gates of my brain, and eventually gets realised… so yeah, there’s a sort of sound, I guess I have a sort of signature sound that I became known with…
Starting with Art Official Intelligence, you became popular thanks to shows, and the internet…
Yeah, shows were the main things… well that’s not true, the internet wasn’t there yet… AOI… we all went to the same college, and the way I got to be known was the college radio show, which had a good signal and reached Connecticut, most of Rhode Island, parts of Massachusetts, so I went up on their radio station everyday, or at least once a week, to make a fool of myself, just to get people listening, and make people know that I was a name that I wanted them to learn, but then the band came about and this was the first time I got to do a lot of live shows… Hip-hop got a bad reputation in clubs in the mid-nineties, just a lot of rowdy motherfuckers, gunshots and dead people just didn’t make club owners happy… so they shut their doors to hip-hop… that was a situation we had to deal with… but when we presented ourselves as a band, they didn’t really think “hip-hop”, and they were like “ok, you can play, come in”, so we started doing shows, and when they noticed that we didn’t attract a hostile crowd, we had a positive message in our music… and it was just a good performance, they let us come back, and it opened up other doors in Rhode Island, people to let us perform, so the band started doing a lot of shows, and we had a lot of friends, and they would come to the show and bring more friends, so the shows became bigger and bigger… and we put out tapes, and we sold them for like 3 dollars… just kept it real simple and real cheap, and the main thing was to keep people aware of the music… and then one of the members put up the website, and still today, the AOI website is not a place that people visit really often, it’s just this old piece of webspace that just needs to be buried in the ground… and by the time our CD came out I think it was in 97, but it bordered on 1998 because it just took a long time to get anything put together… we had a manager at the time, and he had aspirations for us, and he thought he could break us into the mainstream, but the mainstream wasn’t ready for that kind of shit yet, and we weren’t even up to par with well produced bands, and we sounded a lot like The Roots, we were a hip-hop band, but we weren’t just to that level and my lyrics needed a bit more refining, and that came about eventually, but now with the band… it just became too much work and effort, and the more I travelled the less I was able to be with the band because we couldn’t really get 6 or 7 members around the country… so when I started winning battles people started flying me out to certain cities to perform, as I said it was a promotional tool, and people wanted to see my name more, people wanted to check me out live, it all worked out like that, so the band was really important in building my career from the get-go but I wasn’t able to maintain it; one thing I’m looking forward to though is in February, I am touring with a band, it’s not AOI, it’s a band from Rhode Island, and it’s the first time I get to play all these AOI songs everywhere, it’s gonna be real dope, I’m excited about that…
So what is a Sage Francis show like, what are we to expect tonight?
Well… at this point, my performances are very minimalistic… I’m taking this opportunity, when I’m not with a band, and I don’t have a DJ at this point, to make use of my solo act on stage, it gives me a chance to do a lot of spoken word, to fuck around, and to do the kind of things I won’t be able to do with the band and… just the dynamic of my performance with the band is gonna make it more impressive because people who are already familiar with this performance I do right now are gonna see how diverse it can get, because with a band you can do so much more stuff, it’s exciting in different ways, I don’t know I’m really looking forward to it… So tonight you can expect a lot of spoken word, and I guess songs that I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, just a mix of a lot of the releases I’ve already done of Non-Prophets songs and obscure Personal Journals tracks, people seem to enjoy it a lot, they dig the shows… I can get away with it, that’s all it comes down to…
Would you like at some point to make shows like Buck 65, making the music on stage as well as rapping?
Yeah, yeah, that would be awesome… I’ve done that actually, a couple of years ago, started to fuck around with that, but I wasn’t nearly at the level at which Buck 65 works on but I’m not as good as a DJ… as a DJ he fuckin is unbelievable, Buck 65 just kills shit… I’m just this real rudimentary quarter-scratch-boy, and I don’t really think it’s worth it for a live show to see me fumble behind the turntables… as a comedy act it works, I did it with Shalem, my other DJ would let me come and play with the turntables during our show… it was more funny than it was impressive, and it was kind of how I wanted it to be… when I’m all by myself there’s no need for me to fuck around, and act like it’s worth it for me to play my own music on turntables, like, fuck it, that’s not why you know my music, you don’t know me because I’m a DJ, you know me because I probably said something that you thought at one point in you life, and I just put it in a clever way; and here I am saying more of it, I just want to get it all out of my system, and make people happy, be entertaining… a show is supposed to make people feel good or at least feel something… if you leave a show feeling blank and void I might as well fucking kill myself onstage, which I do, basically… some GG Allin type of shit…
Do you get a lot of inspiration from GG Allin and the punk scene?
Yeah… I own a documentary on him, ‘Hated’, in fact I take sample of it, I used it on ‘Personal Journals’, it’s at the end of the ‘Strange Famous’; he was twisted, he had his fuckin problems… but I don’t think you can blow him off as just a nutcase, I think he had a lot of social relevance, and as little as people knew of him, what he brought into a live stage was immediate and threatening and… if nothing else thought-provoking… If someone takes a shit on stage and throws it at you, it makes you move, in one way or another it’s fuckin tight… you know I’m not at that level, but I do beat the shit out of myself on stage sometimes because it just feels right… I bang my head with the microphone, not at the extent that he has, but I almost feel that I can relate and understand why the fuck he did it; it’s a strange world on stage, and if you tap into it correctly you gonna do some strange things, and if it’s done correctly it will make sense to everybody who’s there, I don’t ever want to force anything when I perform; I want it to be honest, and I want it to be special too… you can’t force I’m “special”, but the kind of reactions I’m getting I feel that I’m doing the right thing, that’s why I continue to do it, I feel ok doing my solo act the way I do, I don’t like to see a rapper on stage fuckin around with a DAT machine, and I don’t like to see people pressing buttons and fuckin around with tracks instead of having a DJ, but if you can get away with it and bring something else on the table and you can work on multiple levels then… freak it, do it…
Do you think that what you said about the mid-nineties, hip-hop getting a bad reputation in clubs is still true today?
We’re probably gonna enter a new era of that happening, I know there’s a lot of areas out there where they don’t allow hip-hop shows, but in 96-97 hip-hop shows were hard to come by where I was living at, and that’s unfortunate; if De La Soul came is playing a show you shouldn’t have to worry about a shooting, but club owners don’t know the difference between DMX and De La Soul… and I reference DMX because it was his show that someone got shot and killed at… Nowadays, I don’t know, it’s different… the underground scene is bigger and bigger, and we’re doing more shows and we’re making it more obvious to promoters and club owners the kind of things that we do, you don’t really have to worry about until you fuckin get Dibbs on stage and Slug, and we start mosh-pits and beat the shit out of the emo-boy in the front row… You I’m gonna backtrack a little, by the time I’ve done my career I hope not to allowed in any club in every city, at least one in every city although I’ve done my job… not that anyone should get killed, but I think it’s nice to break a lot of stuff if the club is an asshole, as a collective…
Do you intend to do this all over the world?
No… it’s different, when I’m out of the American border, I have to switch up a little bit, because I don’t want to ever go to a prison in a country I don’t belong to, because I don’t know the rules, and I don’t know what it’s like… I’m respectful, I’m not gonna front and act like I’m gonna go there and act psycho, and be stupid onstage… I’m there though, and it’s not a safe thing… I hate for people to go out there and act like it’s an after-school special because it’s not… If I feel threatened by somebody, then I go after it, and that happens at show sometimes and I never take my eyes off that instigator in the crowd until he calms down… I don’t know what would happen worldwide, with this European tour, I’m doing my best to talk to people and understand the situation of every country I go to, and get some honest and interesting perspectives not only on America but on their country and the world in general… hopefully by the end of the tour, I’ll find an element… a combining or abounding element that exists everywhere, because I really think that everybody all over the world is suffering from a similar struggle, there’s something there that we all share and I want to find it, and I want that to link us all together somehow…
Do you have anything to tell French people before you go there?
Just… be considerate, and I will be too, be courteous, and I will be too… Let’s shake hands… and kiss girls.