A Quote by Bradford Cox

You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.
You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste.
Me, l'm a weird person, so my music is kind of weird, but l want my music to be weird.
I really liked punk music and experimental music that my brother was taking me to go see in the city, when I was probably, like, 13 years old. I was seeing a lot of teenagers making 'weird' music, and I think that was probably a big part of the reason that I actually started to play myself.
For me, music is sort of my passion, more so than being an actor. I just never tried to make a career as a musician. It was just something that I did on my own time, just for me. I had written a lot of songs, but I don't really record a lot of music because, for me, it's the same way as a poet: I write to get things out. It's sort of cathartic.
For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.
I've always identified people's taste in music as being kind of hetero and/or homo - there's music people like because they feel like they have aesthetic similarity to it and the music they wish to create, and then there's music that represents the other, that they listen to because it represents an escape from the music that they have to make.
My start came with experimental musicians and live bands. I never played with DJ's because it wasn't really the correct fit. It fit in more with someone using a laptop to create their own electronic music. When you're doing music like that, it's hard to get more than 20 people to come to your show.
I started playing classical music, and I still do. I think music ultimately is kind of on a theoretical level, is about collecting and learning as much vocabulary as possible. It's kind of like writing. It's kind of like writing because the more you read, the more you hear people describe things. The more you soak in, as far as vocabulary, the more access you have in order to express yourself accurately and vividly.
I don't view myself as a musician anymore - I view myself as a human being that functions as a musician when I'm functioning as a musician, but that's not 24 hours a day. That's really opened me up to even more perspectives because now I look at music, not from the standpoint of being a musician, but from the standpoint of being a human being.
I owe a lot to my parents, because they kept no genre off limits. Music was always playing in the house. They never told me to be quiet, turn the music down or anything like that. So I felt pretty free and experimental as a kid to kind of figure out my own voice.
Listening closely to songs these days, there's a lot of lazy songwriting where people get away with it. I don't want to be too critical about it. But I also feel like I wanted to say something a bit different from just being a musician and singing about yourself. Ultimately, that's not really interesting to me. Even when I was a kid, I was interested in observing people and maybe making my own stories. That kind of reflects in my music.
Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.
Since I started, I've always been giving my music away for free. I've always kind of done it for the people. I don't want to lose my fans completely because they support me in a way that's more than just listening to my music. They support me like we're friends. They support me like they have emotions invested in it.
When I started Fool's Gold and producing consistent records that were like electro beats with rapping on it that was experimental and weird. I made a mixtape called Dirty South Dance where I put rap vocals over dance music. That was literally an experiment. Now all these rappers are rapping on dance music. This is something I've been trying to build for a while.
I am so all over the place with my music taste, it's ridiculous. It is! I mean, I find myself listening to weird things like hardcore techno music and then I'll be listening to mainstream hip-hop music. But it's like I am so crazy with my music taste. I'll listen to a song, I'll become obsessed with it, and then I'm on to the next one. So it's just very inconsistent.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
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