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!"

Babatunde Adebimpe

Categorized in : Bridges Wall Library

Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting.

Babatunde Adebimpe

race people art

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

sound feelings song

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

feelings art thinking

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

turns enough knows

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.

Babatunde Adebimpe

musician sides father

Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.

Babatunde Adebimpe

ten running years

I don't want my reasons to be informed by what people think about what I'm doing.

Babatunde Adebimpe

want people thinking

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

pockets lessons song

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

Babatunde Adebimpe

party social thinking

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."

Babatunde Adebimpe

insane running thinking

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

carrots opposites people

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

hug lonely real

I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.

Babatunde Adebimpe

new-york littles people

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

numbers attention people

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

effort voice unique

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

Babatunde Adebimpe

silence people rooms

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

sky littles believe

If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.

Babatunde Adebimpe

bowie creative writing

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.

Babatunde Adebimpe

years art moving

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."

Babatunde Adebimpe

fifth-grade leaving people