I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
Interpretation
Rebellion loses its authenticity when commodified by corporations.
David Byrne's quote critiques the commercialization of rebellion, suggesting that when countercultural movements are packaged and sold by major corporations, their authenticity and significance can diminish. He implies that true rebellion stems from genuine discontent and should not be co-opted for profit.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about consumer culture and authenticity at a public speaking event.
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.
We don't make music, it makes us
When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.
Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.
There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.
breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.