Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?
Interpretation
Investing in future creativity is more beneficial than clinging to past achievements.
David Byrne's quote emphasizes the importance of innovation and progress in the arts, particularly music. Instead of focusing on protecting and preserving past traditions, he advocates for investing in new ideas and creativity that can shape the future of music, suggesting that growth and evolution are essential for artistic vitality.
In practice
During a lecture about the evolution of music, this quote can highlight the importance of embracing new genres.
Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.
You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.
Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it's peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it's not always the best thing.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
You know, I designed the Queen crest. I simply combined all the creatures that represent our star signs-and I don't even believe in astrology.
I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.'
Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.
As a writer, a blank page will humble the hell out of you. It always does, and it always will.
My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.
The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
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