Babatunde Adebimpe Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.
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Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.
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When I'm in the mode of feeling positive about love, I don't really feel the need to mark it down in song. In fact, I know what that song would sound like, and I would not subject anybody to that.
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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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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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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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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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There are people who kind of let you know that you can silence the room.
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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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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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Painting and animation can be kind of long work. Music was more immediate and more fun.
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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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Even as a fan, as someone who's into his performances, the Stooges and his own stuff, Iggy [Pop] is one of the people who kept underlining something that a lot of my older musician friends with punk roots say: you get into this space in your life where you feel like a weirdo, you're marginalised, you don't fit in... and then you can get up on stage in front of people who probably hate you.
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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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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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I don't want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I'm doing.
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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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I was born in St. Louis and lived in Pittsburgh for a bit, before my family moved to Nigeria, where they're from. We lived there for three or four years and came back to the States when I was about ten. I realised that I'd gone from place to place not fitting in. The thing that helped me fit in when moving around and not having a ton of friends was that I could make art. That was the through-line.
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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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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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A lot of people have reunion things, but I think bands are supposed to break up.
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The cynicism doesn't come across in the final; it can be taken as a very sincere plea for someone to not go away.
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I want to be around these positive, expressive people who are doing something different and who also want to get the hell out of there and don't want to be around basic human bullshit.
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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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I probably couldn't have the same experience listening to that song because I'm self-conscious about some of my singing parts.
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