Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Wyatt

Wyatt is doing that musician thing where a joke is also a boundary. By calling “the business” hard, he’s not confessing incompetence so much as refusing the language that turns art into a ledger. The killer move is the pivot: the instant you try to speak fluently about commerce, you “start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.” That reference isn’t just a gag about dim rock stars; it’s a warning about how easily sincerity curdles into self-parody once you adopt industry talk. Spinal Tap is what happens when rock mythology becomes a script you can’t escape: big talk, small insight, identity swallowed by the performance of being “in the business.”

Wyatt’s career makes the line bite. Coming out of the post-psychedelic British scene (Soft Machine, the wider Canterbury orbit), he built a reputation on music that’s stubbornly idiosyncratic and politically awake, then rebuilt his life and work after a life-altering accident. He’s not pretending money and machinery don’t exist; he’s saying that discussing them publicly forces you into a role that flattens the real stakes. Industry speech is designed to sound competent, not truthful. It rewards the illusion of control, the fantasy that a career is a series of smart moves instead of a messy collision of taste, luck, bodies, and time.

So the quote lands as self-defense with a punchline: if you have to become Spinal Tap to talk shop, maybe the shop talk is the problem.