Music is worth doing just because. It doesn’t have to be justified by some political point of view, and it’s kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else.
Interpretation
Music exists for its own sake and should not be used for any external agenda.
Elliott Smith emphasizes the intrinsic value of music, arguing that it should be appreciated and created purely for its own beauty and emotional expression. He suggests that reducing music to a mere tool for political or social purposes diminishes its true artistic essence and undermines the passion and creativity involved in making it.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of artistic freedom at a local arts festival.
I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.
Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.
It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
Overacting is a self-indulgence, while underacting comes either through a lack of talent or a lack of courage.
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