A Quote by Doug Aitken

The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.
The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.
In the early 20th century the monarchy was held up as the archetypical virtuous British family. In the late 20th century it became the most wonderful symbol of the complete re-engineering of family structures.
D-Day represents the greatest achievement of the american people and system in the 20th century. It was the pivot point of the 20th century. It was the day on which the decision was made as to who was going to rule in this world in the second half of the 20th century. Is it going to be Nazism, is it going to be communism, or are the democracies going to prevail?
If a song is longer than three and a half minutes, it'll need something to keep you entertained.
If a song is longer than three and a half minutes, itll need something to keep you entertained.
'Cause a musician, you can't tell me, "I've got this message I want share with the public," and it's three-and-a-half minutes long. That's not it. If your message is only three-and-a-half minutes long, then we got nothing else to talk about. Because life is more complex than three-and-a-half minutes.
It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.
I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.
We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.
In the 19th and 20th centuries we saw nature as something to use to our profit, but the attitude of man towards nature in the 21st century will be a bit different.
'Pop' is not a bad word. What's more interesting than changing the chemistry in a room in three minutes with a song?
Pop is like a puzzle: to write a perfect pop song, you never know, and there's so much that can happen in a second with a song.
There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can't do it in five minutes. You can't listen to 'The Rite of Spring' once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.
It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.
I'm not a drama person, but when you can make a movie in song form in three-and-a-half minutes, it's surreal.
A cupcake is like a great pop song. The whole world in less than three minutes. And it's impossible to have a bad cupcake. In New York you walk everywhere. So I'm always looking, always on the eternal search for the perfect cupcake. I take them very seriously. It's like hunting and gathering for me.
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