Success Quote by La Monte Young

There is something almost scandalous about La Monte Young framing “failure” not as a wrong note or a botched form, but as a failure of transport. “Carried away to Heaven” isn’t pious; it’s pragmatic. Young, one of minimalism’s most uncompromising architects, has spent decades treating sound as an environment you enter, not a product you consume. In that light, Heaven reads less like theology and more like a target state: altered attention, suspended time, a body re-tuned.

The line is also a quiet rebuke to the polite, museumified way contemporary music often gets heard. Minimalism is frequently sold as chic wallpaper for upscale interiors; Young’s version demands the opposite. His long drones, sustained tones, and just intonation aren’t meant to sit nicely in the background. They’re engineered to overpower the listener’s usual mental narration until the room feels bigger than the self inside it. “Carried away” is key: the listener isn’t collaborating so much as surrendering.

Subtextually, it’s a statement of artistic ethics. Young refuses the modern bargain where art’s job is to be “interesting” or “innovative” in small, legible ways. He’s setting a brutal standard: if the work doesn’t produce transcendence, it’s not merely disappointing, it’s inadequate. The audacity is the point. In an era that rewards irony and distance, Young insists on an almost devotional seriousness - not about belief, but about the raw, physiological power of sound to make people leave ordinary life behind.