How Music Works by David Byrne

“It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive. Our innovations and creations, after all, are what keep many seemingly unrelated industries alive.”
&
“The Brazilian composer Tom Zé, who has to some extent bridged the elite world of academic composition and popular music, proposes a theory in which, in a weird nod to Adorno, workers are (poorly) ‘manufactured’ by the system—in other words, the capitalist project aims to create cogs in the machine. But Zé says that our manufacture is defective, and that our quirks and our innate humanity make us, in effect, damaged goods. We’ll never work the way we were designed to; our humanity is our saving defect. In a way, he’s saying that while Adorno might be right about the system’s intention, he’s wrong about how things actually work out. Zé and his music prove that we will always fuck the system up in the most beautiful and unexpected ways.”

-David Byrne