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.
Interpretation
Real sadness can profoundly impact one's existence, making it challenging for individuals to simply cheer up and move on.
In this quote, David Byrne expresses that true sadness is a deep and powerful emotion that completely alters a person's everyday experience. It suggests that when someone is immersed in their pain, it becomes difficult for them to just switch to a happier state on command, as the intensity of their feelings must be acknowledged rather than dismissed by simplistic advice to feel better.
In practice
In a mental health awareness event to underline the importance of acknowledging deep emotions.
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.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
We don't make music, it makes us
We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.
When you're under a microscope from an early age, you realize that people aren't always going to like you. And that's OK. And you're going to fail publicly, and that's OK, too.
Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.
I couldn't wait until I grew up. I used to look at my mom's stockings and put them on with her high heels and mess with my hair.
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.