Daily Inspiration Quote by Mike Figgis

There’s a quiet accusation buried in Figgis’s line: that we’ve trained ourselves to treat music like a guilty pleasure needing legal counsel. “Apologize” is the tell. It implies a courtroom culture around taste, where people pre-emptively explain away their affection for something too earnest, too commercial, too uncool, too “background.” Figgis isn’t lamenting music’s decline so much as calling out the modern habit of self-protection: the reflex to add caveats (“I know it’s cheesy, but…”) before admitting you’re moved.

As a director, he’s unusually attuned to how music gets instrumentalized - used to signal sophistication, credibility, or ironic distance rather than feeling. Film culture has its own version of this apology: the suspicion of sentiment, the fetish for “authentic” roughness, the need for a soundtrack choice to read as a thesis statement. When people apologize for music, they’re often apologizing for vulnerability. Music bypasses argument; it hits the body first. That makes it harder to defend with the usual intellectual armor.

The subtext is also generational. Figgis came up amid shifting hierarchies of taste: rock versus classical, “serious” jazz versus pop, then the late-20th-century explosion of genre mixing and ubiquitous recorded sound. As music became everywhere - piped into shops, chopped into ads, flattened by algorithms - listeners started justifying their preferences as if they were confessing to a minor vice. Figgis’s jab is a plea for a more adult relationship with pleasure: stop laundering your emotions through apology and let the art do what it does.