Art & Creativity Quote by Paul Westerberg

Reading sheet music, in Westerberg's hands, becomes a perfect little insult: not to literacy itself, but to the idea that the most important parts of music can be captured, certified, and sorted on a staff. "Listening to flowers" is a deliberately mismatched metaphor, a sideways jab at category errors. You can look at flowers, smell them, even press them between pages, but "listening" to them suggests a dutiful exercise that misses the point. The subtext is that reading music can be a kind of administrative relationship to sound: accurate, transferable, and emotionally bloodless.

As a musician who came up in rock rather than conservatory corridors, Westerberg is also defending a lineage where feel outranks fluency, and where not knowing the official language is sometimes worn as proof of authenticity. In punk and post-punk culture, ignorance is often a strategy: a refusal to let expertise become gatekeeping. The line carries that chip-on-the-shoulder pride, but it isn't just anti-intellectual posturing. It's a critique of how institutions flatten experience into notation, as if the soul of a performance were a set of instructions.

There's a sly self-awareness, too. Westerberg knows the provocation lands because it tweaks a real anxiety: that "real" musicians are supposed to read. By making the analogy absurd, he exposes the social fiction underneath the demand. Music, he implies, is not a text to decode; it's a sensation to risk, screw up, and mean.