"After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz"
About this Quote
There is a casually brutal honesty in the phrase "exhausted the blues thing" that tells you almost everything about Robert Quine's sensibility: restless, unsentimental, allergic to rock mythology. He frames a whole tradition not as an altar but as a room you can pace until the air runs out. The blues becomes "the blues thing" - not reverence, but a working material, a set of moves. Quine isn't dismissing it so much as refusing to pretend it has infinite mileage for him personally.
The subtext is about appetite and limits. Blues, especially in postwar American guitar culture, often functions as origin story and credential. To say you exhausted it is to reject the idea that authenticity is a permanent home you move into. Quine implies a musician's obligation is not loyalty to a genre but pursuit of complexity: when the emotional vocabulary of blues starts to feel predetermined, you go looking for a language with more harmonic angles, more rhythmic argument.
Jazz, here, reads less like a snobbish upgrade than a new problem set. It's where improvisation stops being a vibe and becomes a discipline. Quine came up in a New York ecosystem that prized hybridization (punk, no wave, downtown art scenes), and his guitar playing carried that: sharp-edged, inquisitive, sometimes almost adversarial. The line works because it punctures the romance of endless blues authenticity and replaces it with a working musician's truth: growth can mean outgrowing your heroes, and moving on without apology.
The subtext is about appetite and limits. Blues, especially in postwar American guitar culture, often functions as origin story and credential. To say you exhausted it is to reject the idea that authenticity is a permanent home you move into. Quine implies a musician's obligation is not loyalty to a genre but pursuit of complexity: when the emotional vocabulary of blues starts to feel predetermined, you go looking for a language with more harmonic angles, more rhythmic argument.
Jazz, here, reads less like a snobbish upgrade than a new problem set. It's where improvisation stops being a vibe and becomes a discipline. Quine came up in a New York ecosystem that prized hybridization (punk, no wave, downtown art scenes), and his guitar playing carried that: sharp-edged, inquisitive, sometimes almost adversarial. The line works because it punctures the romance of endless blues authenticity and replaces it with a working musician's truth: growth can mean outgrowing your heroes, and moving on without apology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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