listening after they turn thirty or so and I was barely writing songs before I turned 30. He also said music might be finished, that maybe we had 700-800 years of music and we’ve just got mood music and metronomes now. But I do want to try to be a person in the world too. My grandfather groomed himself and he got lucky, but I’m too attracted and repulsed by it. There’s an idea that as a performer you have to be giving something. I don’t think you can give anyone anything that they don’t make for themselves. In other cultures, like in West Africa they have griots. They had a very particular place in the culture. Here, it’s sometimes like one big game. There’s nothing wrong with things being a game but when I write something, I’m really perplexed by it. Why it is in the world? In a way I’m doing it because I want to share what I am doing. I want to explore it. Yet there’s always a paradigm in performing. Like renown in a particular scene or city. It’s like crabs pulling each other down and pushing each other in a barrel of boiling water. You get nervous about going to this show or that show and every single moment is a part of a career.
22: It’s a game with no rules sometimes. JWV: Yeah, if you know that you are playing, it can be fun perhaps. The only billionaire artists are
Steven Spielburg and George Lucas, so obviously, nobody really wants anybody to become an artist in this country. People are like why are you doing this? What’s the point? At the same time it’s the only thing that seems for a brief moment to feel real. Art is where we have the opportunity to invite others to share in a new idea of reality. I’m not saying art is better than not art. Not art doesn’t allow you to collaborate, it throws answers in your face. Art creates more questions.
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