Wit & Attitude Quote by Adam Duritz

Duritz turns despair into a punchline you can sing along to. The image is simple: the world as a “big hole,” an empty space that doesn’t answer back. But the real sting is in the acoustic metaphor. You “shout” your whole life - confession, ambition, protest, love - and what returns isn’t understanding, it’s just sound. An echo. The universe doesn’t rebut you; it merely recycles you.

Then he swerves: the echo isn’t even your own voice, it’s “some idiot yelling nonsense.” That’s not just self-loathing, it’s a dig at the modern noise economy: attention as a feedback loop where volume masquerades as meaning. The “idiot” can be the crowd, the media, the internet before the internet, or the ugliest possibility: the part of you that’s been trained to talk in clichés. Either way, the line captures a specific kind of alienation musicians know well - you perform into darkness, you tour, you give people pieces of yourself, and the response can feel strangely impersonal, like the room is reacting to an idea of you.

The humor matters because it’s defensive and clarifying. By calling the nonsense “nonsense,” Duritz admits the fear that so much self-expression is just noise, then refuses to sanctify it. It’s a bleak thought made survivable through comedy: if the world is a void, at least you can name the stupidity bouncing back.