Music is worth doing just because. It doesn’t have to be justified by some political point of view, and it’s kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else.
Interpretation
Music exists for its own sake and should not be used for any external agenda.
Elliott Smith emphasizes the intrinsic value of music, arguing that it should be appreciated and created purely for its own beauty and emotional expression. He suggests that reducing music to a mere tool for political or social purposes diminishes its true artistic essence and undermines the passion and creativity involved in making it.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of artistic freedom at a local arts festival.
I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.
Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
But the building's identity resided in the ornament.
It's work to play the same songs the same way for 70 shows.
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