Charlemagne Palestine Quotes

“Around 1977 I became very ... negative, I began to do things unconsciously that I didn't understand, and they were very sabotagistic and I didn't know what I was doing. I was pissing everybody off, I was breaking my bridges. I was hostile to people, I was doing performances and insulting people there - I was doing whatever I could to destroy whatever world I had created ten years before, without knowing, really, why”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I never became primarily a musician! I've always been a wanderer and I'm always bored.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I don't like the piano player music of the movies, the Michael Nyman, and sometimes that piano music makes me puke. It's not really romantic. It's just trying to get your Pavlovian juices flowing because it's a technique now.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I'm not afraid to be a Russian Jewish romantic in my approach to anything, even in my animal divinities, or anything about the feeling.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

For Jewish people, salmon has a special meaning, not just because it's a flavor we've had all along our diaspora. Salmon also have this special return-to-their-roots desire. At the end of their lives, salmon try to swim back to when they were born. Even if they can't, they have this obsession. We as diaspora people love that a lot about salmon.

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I played to 20,000 people every day because people were walking on 5th Ave going to and from their jobs, and my sounds were bathing them in all kinds of dissonance, consonance, resonance, and things like that.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“People never heard bells in Western music sounding really cataclysmic. You hear that more in Russian music or in Asian, Indonesian traditions.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I never made any money from my music. I don't make that much; I make it flip-flopping between five and ten different disciplines.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession!”

— Charlemagne Palestine

There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse.

— Charlemagne Palestine

Not that I have anything against music now, but I just hated being an anything. I don't know why.

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I actually started as a singer in Brooklyn, and I lived in a community. To get out of the ghetto of my community, I was a musician.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“I never wanted to have a profession, and I've succeeded in not having one, or if I did have one it never paid, or it's never been especially long-term.”

— Charlemagne Palestine

“There are pieces that in the history of music that also make me cry. I'm not ashamed to cry.”

— Charlemagne Palestine