I don’t want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I’m doing.
BABATUNDE ADEBIMPEI 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!”
More Babatunde Adebimpe Quotes
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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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I was living in a loft with Dave Sitek – this loft full of people just working on their stuff. Some were painting, some were writing. Any plans you had were kind of like a plan for the next two months.
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My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.
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If you push hard enough you can change. You can take everything you know and round it up, turn it into something else, and keep turning things into something else.
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You turn into this desperate dude looking for a shred of attention when you just had so much. It’s like, “I’m just lonely and all I really want is a hug, but I gotta capture that in something real gross.” You start to understand why circus clowns are alcoholics.
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You can physically move yourself around but there’s that great line that Adam wrote: “Does it define for life, like print of thumb?” I think it does.
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One second you’re having the time of your life in front of all these people, and then you come backstage to the exact opposite – there’s only lukewarm carrots back there.
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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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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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There was something in me, even leaving fifth grade, that hit me and said, “I have to get out of here. I don’t know where, and I don’t know what else I can do but I’m really not going to end up like any of these people.”
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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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There are people who kind of let you know that you can silence the room.
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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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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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Most of the bands that I really hold in my heart – you don’t think about them as bands; they’re just the soundtrack of your life.
BABATUNDE ADEBIMPE






