"If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live"
About this Quote
Jessye Norman is calling out a particular kind of self-surveillance: the habit of outsourcing your nerve to the crowd. The weather vane and the thumb-in-the-air aren’t just cute images; they’re instruments of constant calibration, the little rituals people perform when they’re trying to stay lovable, bookable, and uncontroversial. For a singer who built a career on bold repertoire choices and an unmistakable sonic identity, that’s not merely timid. It’s self-erasure.
The intent here is practical and moral at once. Norman isn’t romanticizing rebellion for its own sake; she’s describing the cost of living as a perpetual focus group. When you check the wind before every “different” move, difference becomes impossible by definition. Innovation requires misreading the room sometimes, or ignoring it. Her phrasing makes that feel bodily and immediate: you can picture someone literally pausing mid-impulse to measure public opinion, like it’s a physical climate they have to survive.
The subtext is especially sharp in the context of classical music and celebrity culture, spaces where “taste” often functions like a gate. For Black women artists in elite institutions, the pressure to be palatable can be relentless: repertoire expectations, presentation, even the politics of ambition. Norman’s line about “a very strange way to live” lands as both critique and diagnosis. It suggests that approval-seeking isn’t just limiting; it distorts your sense of self until caution feels like normalcy.
The intent here is practical and moral at once. Norman isn’t romanticizing rebellion for its own sake; she’s describing the cost of living as a perpetual focus group. When you check the wind before every “different” move, difference becomes impossible by definition. Innovation requires misreading the room sometimes, or ignoring it. Her phrasing makes that feel bodily and immediate: you can picture someone literally pausing mid-impulse to measure public opinion, like it’s a physical climate they have to survive.
The subtext is especially sharp in the context of classical music and celebrity culture, spaces where “taste” often functions like a gate. For Black women artists in elite institutions, the pressure to be palatable can be relentless: repertoire expectations, presentation, even the politics of ambition. Norman’s line about “a very strange way to live” lands as both critique and diagnosis. It suggests that approval-seeking isn’t just limiting; it distorts your sense of self until caution feels like normalcy.
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| Topic | Confidence |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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