Babatunde Adebimpe Quotes

There are people who kind of let you know that you can silence the room.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

You have to be a really talented writer if you're trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don't have the focus to do that, really.

No one wanted a job. No one could hold a job. You tend to see those going hand in hand.

Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.

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.

I like the model of people getting together to make something when they want to do it and not being dictated to by a cycle.

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.

Touring is really a weird social experiment, even though everyone thinks it's a party every day.

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.