Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how music and culture are often reduced to simplistic labels, highlighting the complexities of artistic expression.
Sufjan Stevens discusses the tendency of society to categorize and commodify music and cultural movements into single terms like 'emo' or 'grunge.' He suggests that this linguistic simplification fails to capture the deeper mysteries and nuances of artistic expression and cultural identity, posing a critique of how language can inadvertently shape our understanding of profound concepts.
In practice
During a discussion on modern music, one might quote Sufjan Stevens to highlight how artists can be unfairly boxed into categories.
I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
Every time Jimmy Scott sings, it's the same but slightly different. I don't know how he does that or where he gets that from. I think it's instinct. Nothing he does is by chance; he's in complete control of what he's doing. He's just beautiful and unique.
I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all.
These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.
My directors of photography light my films, but the colours of the sets, furnishings, clothes, hairstyles - that's me. Everything that's in front of the camera, I bring you.
Everybody comes to film differently; everybody has different backgrounds. Just find whatever your lane is naturally. Don't try to force yourself into someone else's vision or try to tell a story that you're not passionate about.
I was 12 and read my first romance novel; it was a sweeping desert saga, and I got to the end of it and was like, 'I want to go back and start all over again!' That emotional response to the book and getting to the end of a story you love is what inspires me to write the next book.
I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.
When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.