I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.
BABATUNDE ADEBIMPEThere are a lot of spikes that can happen when what you’re doing starts to get attention or people start to talk about it. They can just kind of really do a number on your reasons for making music.
More Babatunde Adebimpe Quotes
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I’ve had terrible, terrible, terrible shows where I just thought, “That was off-key” or I forgot lines or I thought I looked like an idiot, and then you’re leaving and talking to people, and they’re like, “I had the best time of my life! That was amazing!” You just never know.
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Adding instruments to parts of a song and having them somehow find a pocket. That to me was a huge lesson. Like, there’s more than 808s in the universe.
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I feel like now if you’re going to start a band you have to have an Instagram full of yourself looking a certain way, lined up like five dudes in mugshot alley, hanging out by the bridge or up against the wall, or “We’re in a library for some reason!”
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I think that music and art and film, at their best, can connect with something that is eternal in human beings, that might not have so many labels on it, something that’s ultimately universal and that may just be a feeling.
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If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.
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Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I’m in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it’s the rare band that doesn’t, like, turn into something else.
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Hearing that [David] Bowie passed was like you don’t really believe it. It’s as if the sky shifted a little bit, to remind you it was there.
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I know that being upset without having an avenue to fix anything is a real hard place to be in for too long. But it’s even worse thinking that it’ll go away if you just ignore it.
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There are a lot of spikes that can happen when what you’re doing starts to get attention or people start to talk about it. They can just kind of really do a number on your reasons for making music.
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Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it’s overcompensating for something missing in the song’s structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it’s never like an assault.
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The feeling of being halfway through a show and just realizing that there’s nothing you can do to save it – it’s a horrible feeling.
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It’s insane when someone shows up to your show and is like, “You could run off with me right now!” I’m like, “It’s cool, I think I’m gonna go read.”
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Being 15 and like a punk in the DIY community, basically being with a group of people like no one else, it was the first place to exclude or call out if people were racist, sexist, homophobic or in any way prejudiced.
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Adam is one of my favourite writers, period. He has such a unique voice and he’s somebody who I admire so much for putting the effort into inventing his own language and furthering it.
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I don’t want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I’m doing.
BABATUNDE ADEBIMPE