Time & Perspective Quote by Bootsy Collins

Bootsy Collins is joking, but he is not really joking. The line lands like an offhand shrug, yet it quietly indicts how modern life has trained even a famously elastic funk mind to think in blocks and slots. When he says "today's programming has rubbed off on me", he is punning on two kinds of programming at once: the TV-and-algorithm sense that parcels attention into neat segments, and the professional sense of scheduling a career into manageable deliverables. Bootsy, the avatar of groove-as-freedom, admits he now has to operate like a network.

The intent reads practical - touring needs lead time, recording needs focus - but the subtext is about a cultural shift in how art gets made and sold. Touring and recording used to be seasons of a musician's life; now they are calendar items competing with promo cycles, content demands, and the constant pressure to stay visible. His repeated "setting time around" is telling. Time is no longer something you inhabit; it is something you fence off, defend, and route around other obligations.

Context matters: Bootsy comes from an era when the studio was a laboratory and the road was a rite, not just an economic necessity. In the streaming age, the incentive structure flips: records can function as marketing for tours, and tours can be content farms. The quote's charm is that it frames this reality as contamination - "rubbed off on me" - a small confession that the machinery of modern media doesn't just distribute music; it rearranges the musician.