Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.
Interpretation
Punk represents a mindset and cultural movement more than a specific genre of music.
David Byrne emphasizes that punk is characterized by a rebellious attitude and a spirit of nonconformity rather than merely the sounds that it produced. This perspective highlights how cultural movements can transcend their artistic forms and resonate with broader social and political ideas, suggesting that the essence of punk lies in its ethos rather than its stylistic elements.
In practice
In a documentary exploring the evolution of music genres, you could cite this quote to illustrate how cultural movements are driven by more than just sound.
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.
I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.
Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.
And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
How you act, walk, look and talk is all part of Hip Hop culture. And the music is colorless. Hip Hop music is made from Black, brown, yellow, red and white.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.