Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. Doorknobs. We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. "Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence." The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray. I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass. That kind of music that's groove or beat oriented just didn't exist in lots of cultures before that. Love, Fidgeting, Common. They need whatever, the other kinds of stuff, whether it's an appearance on Lettterman or posters or ads. The color of white paper. I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it. The way people walk. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that. Share. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.” -- David Byrne, “To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. That doesn't mean they're dishonest. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living. I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.” -- David Byrne, “I don't care how impossible it seems.” -- David Byrne, “The most common music that you hear anywhere in the world now basically has its roots in that union that happened in the last century, or in the century before that. Tweet +1. To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.”, “To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory.
And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?
As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again. Occasionally I get a good sentence off. I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. Dolly Parton, Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter. We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable. When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.
There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. We adapt. Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life. We adapt. In the self-interview on Stop Making Sense; It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed.