Politics & Power Quote by Robert Fripp

Fripp’s deadpan citation of USA Today isn’t about settling a debate with data; it’s about smuggling a punchline into a diagnosis. He borrows the authority of a mass-market newspaper to talk about something musicians feel in their bones: attention as a scarce, contested resource. The specificity of “23 minutes” does two things at once. It sounds empirically sober while also landing as faintly absurd, like a statistic designed for easy repetition rather than deep truth. That’s the tell. Fripp is less interested in the number’s accuracy than in what our hunger for numbers reveals.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the culture industry as much as at listeners. If attention is measurable, it becomes manageable, and if it’s manageable, it can be engineered, marketed, and shortened on purpose. For a musician whose work often demands patience, discipline, and long-form immersion, the statistic reads like a quiet provocation: are we still capable of sustained listening, or have we trained ourselves to need constant novelty and instant payoff?

Context matters here because Fripp comes from a tradition that treats listening as an active practice, not background noise. Dropping “in America” tightens the critique: a media ecosystem built on distraction, consumption, and quick hits, where art risks being reformatted into content. The line isn’t nostalgia. It’s a challenge: if the room gives you 23 minutes, what do you ask of it - and what do you refuse to compromise?