David Byrne

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It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?
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David Byrne Quotes

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.
To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.
I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, 'Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'
There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.
It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.
Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.
If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.
So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.
The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.
Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?
There's more good music being made now than ever before.

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