IN: Michael Kenji Shinoda (, born February 11, 1977) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, rapper, record producer and graphic designer. He co-founded Linkin Park in 1996 and is the band's rhythm guitarist, primary songwriter, keyboardist, producer, and lead vocalist. Shinoda later created a hip-hop-driven side project, Fort Minor, in 2004. He served as a producer for tracks and albums by Lupe Fiasco, Styles of Beyond and The X-Ecutioners.

Shinoda was born on February 11, 1977 in Agoura Hills, California, where he was raised. His father is Japanese. He has a younger brother named Jason. He was raised as a liberal Protestant. Shinoda's mother encouraged him to take classical piano lessons when he was six. By 13, he expressed the desire to move toward playing jazz, blues, and even hip-hop. He later added the guitar and rap-style vocals to his repertoire during his middle school and high school years.  Shinoda attended Agoura High School with Linkin Park bandmates Brad Delson and Rob Bourdon. The three formed the band Xero, and began to make a more serious attempt to pursue a career in the music industry. After graduating high school, Shinoda enrolled in the Art Center College of Design of Pasadena to study graphic design and illustration. He attended classes with DJ and turntablist Joseph Hahn. While studying at the Art Center College of Design, he experienced a form of identity crisis. Years later, he told an interviewer:  I think it was probably in college that I realized that there was a difference between Japanese and Japanese-American. That's important to realize. It's not the same thing and then eventually with Linkin Park, I toured in Japan. I've been there now I think four times. I remember the first time I went, how familiar it seemed, just getting out of the plane, it smelled like my aunt's house, in the airport, it smelled like Japan. I don't know if anybody else even noticed it but I walked out of the plane and thought this is definitely familiar to me, didn't even see anything yet. And then going to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, you just recognize things about the way people act, the small things that people do such as how you'll grab a piece of paper. There are things that are more obvious like taking somebody's business card with two hands. You don't do that in the States. When I saw somebody do that I went, "Oh yeah, my uncle always does that," you know. There are little things that culturally come from Japan but they also exist in Japanese American culture and it made me feel like the connection was there and I kind of hadn't realized how much of it was there.  Shinoda graduated in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts in Illustration and obtained a job as a graphic designer.
QUESTION: What was his family like?
IN: Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider to a Jewish family in Mineola, New York, grew up in nearby Bellmore, and attended Wellington C. Mepham High School. His parents divorced when he was five years old (the documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth claims he was eight years old), and Lenny lived with various relatives over the next decade. His British-born father, Myron (Mickey) Schneider, was a shoe clerk and Lenny saw him very infrequently.

On October 4, 1961, Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that "to is a preposition, come is a verb", that the sexual context of come is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, he "probably can't come". Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity.  Bruce was arrested again in 1961, in Philadelphia, for drug possession and again in Los Angeles, two years later. The Los Angeles arrest took place in then-unincorporated West Hollywood, and the arresting officer was a young deputy named Sherman Block, who later became County Sheriff. The specification this time was that the comedian had used the word schmuck, an insulting Yiddish term that is an obscene term for penis. The Hollywood charges were later dismissed.  On December 5, 1962, Bruce was arrested on stage at the legendary Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago. The same year he played at Peter Cook's The Establishment club in London, and in April the next year he was barred from entering England by the Home Office as an "undesirable alien".  In April 1964, he appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. He was arrested along with the club owners, Howard and Elly Solomon, who were arrested for allowing an obscene performance to take place. On both occasions, he was arrested after leaving the stage, the complaints again pertaining to his use of various obscenities.  A three-judge panel presided over his widely publicized six-month trial, prosecuted by Manhattan Assistant D.A. Richard Kuh, with Ephraim London and Martin Garbus as the defense attorneys. Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon were both found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. The conviction was announced despite positive testimony and petitions of support from - among other artists, writers and educators - Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin, and Manhattan journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen and sociologist Herbert Gans. Bruce was sentenced on December 21, 1964 to four months in a workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Solomon later saw his conviction overturned; Bruce, who died before the decision, never had his conviction stricken. Bruce later received a full posthumous gubernatorial pardon.
QUESTION:
Any other words that were considered to be "obscene"?