Babatunde Adebimpe Quotes

“Ten years is a pretty good run for anything.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“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

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

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“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

“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

You can physically move yourself around but there's that great line that Adam wrote: "Does it define for life, like print of thumb?" I think it does.

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“I want to be around these positive, expressive people who are doing something different and who also want to get the hell out of there and don't want to be around basic human bullshit.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“Being 15 and like a punk in the DIY community, basically being with a group of people like no one else, it was the first place to exclude or call out if people were racist, sexist, homophobic or in any way prejudiced.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“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

“Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it's overcompensating for something missing in the song's structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it's never like an assault.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

I probably couldn't have the same experience listening to that song because I'm self-conscious about some of my singing parts.

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“I know that being upset without having an avenue to fix anything is a real hard place to be in for too long. But it's even worse thinking that it'll go away if you just ignore it.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“You have to be a really talented writer if you're trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don't have the focus to do that, really.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“No one wanted a job. No one could hold a job. You tend to see those going hand in hand.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

I was living in a loft with Dave Sitek - this loft full of people just working on their stuff. Some were painting, some were writing. Any plans you had were kind of like a plan for the next two months.

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“Painting and animation can be kind of long work. Music was more immediate and more fun.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“Most of the bands that I really like no longer exist. That might just be because I'm in my thirties or whatever. But I also think it's the rare band that doesn't, like, turn into something else.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“A lot of people have reunion things, but I think bands are supposed to break up.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“Most of the bands that I really hold in my heart - you don't think about them as bands; they're just the soundtrack of your life.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“I've had terrible, terrible, terrible shows where I just thought, "That was off-key" or I forgot lines or I thought I looked like an idiot, and then you're leaving and talking to people, and they're like, "I had the best time of my life! That was amazing!" You just never know.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“The feeling of being halfway through a show and just realizing that there's nothing you can do to save it - it's a horrible feeling.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“The cynicism doesn't come across in the final; it can be taken as a very sincere plea for someone to not go away.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

I like the model of people getting together to make something when they want to do it and not being dictated to by a cycle.

— Babatunde Adebimpe

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

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“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

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

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

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

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe

“Even as a fan, as someone who's into his performances, the Stooges and his own stuff, Iggy [Pop] is one of the people who kept underlining something that a lot of my older musician friends with punk roots say: you get into this space in your life where you feel like a weirdo, you're marginalised, you don't fit in ... and then you can get up on stage in front of people who probably hate you.”

— Babatunde Adebimpe