Daily Inspiration Quote by John Zorn

Zorn frames Tzadik less as a vanity imprint than as a survival mechanism: an artist building infrastructure because the existing one keeps misplacing the art. The line has the blunt practicality of someone who’s watched records vanish not because they failed aesthetically, but because they failed commercially on a deadline. “Keep things in print” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a refusal to let music be treated like seasonal inventory.

The subtext is an indictment of the record industry’s attention span. Labels “dropping things out of print” sounds like a clerical decision, but Zorn casts it as cultural erasure. The passive voice matters: the work doesn’t die; it’s disappeared. And the trigger isn’t quality, controversy, or even relevance - it’s “when they don’t sell,” the most banal metric imaginable to decide what remains accessible. Zorn’s fatigue (“I got tired”) reads as the moment when idealism hardens into policy.

Contextually, this is a composer who lives in the margins by choice: downtown New York, genre collisions, small audiences who care deeply. For music like his - sprawling discographies, niche collaborations, limited press - availability is part of the art’s meaning. If the catalog evaporates, the story of that scene gets rewritten by whoever still has stock.

Tzadik becomes an act of custodianship and a power move: not begging gatekeepers for longevity, but designing a system where longevity is the default. It’s DIY, but not romanticized. It’s governance.