If our history can challenge the next wave of musicians to keep moving and changing, to keep spiritually hungry and horny, that's what it's all about.
My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry, laugh, dance. If they climaxed spiritually, I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Carlos Santana expresses his purpose as a musician is to bring deep emotional and spiritual experiences to his audience through music.
In this quote, Carlos Santana highlights the transformative power of music to evoke profound emotional responses from listeners. He emphasizes that his mission is to elicit joy and spiritual fulfillment in his concerts, equating the success of his performances with the ability to move people emotionally, whether through tears, laughter, or dance. This reflects the deeper connection between art and the human experience, suggesting that music serves as a vehicle for spiritual ecstasy and emotional release.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about the impact of art on society and individuals.
More from Carlos Santana
All quotes →My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.
I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.
First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.
You can take things that Jimi Hendrix took, from Curtis Mayfield or from Buddy Guy for example, because we are all children of everything, even Picasso. But if you want to stand out, you have to learn to crystallize your existence and create your own fingerprints.
Ever since I was a child I've always been very attracted to melodies. Whether I hear Jeff Beck, a choir, an ocean or the wind, there's always a melody in there.
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I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.