"We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there"
About this Quote
Williams frames music as both intimate and indifferent: we bring our own histories to it, but it doesn`t need our permission to exist. The first sentence nods to the messiness of personal taste and biography - the breakup song that ruins a band for you, the anthem that turns a crowd into a body, the beat that feels like home even when you are not. Then he pivots. "But" is the hinge that strips away ego. Your relationship can be obsessive, casual, or hostile; music remains, like weather. That contrast is the engine of the line: it validates subjectivity while quietly dethroning it.
Coming from Saul Williams, a musician and poet shaped by spoken-word politics and hip-hop`s argument with power, the sentiment also reads as a survival ethic. Music becomes infrastructure: something you can lose jobs, lovers, countries - but the sound stays available, waiting to be re-entered. There`s a subtle comfort here, but not the soft kind. It is steadier: an insistence that culture outlasts individual crises and that expression is not a luxury item, it`s a constant.
The subtext also pushes against gatekeeping. If music is "always there", it can`t be fully owned by industries, critics, or scenes. People can be excluded from venues, priced out of festivals, algorithmically siloed - yet the underlying human impulse to make rhythm and melody persists. Williams is pointing at music as a commons: endlessly reinterpreted, never exhausted, and, crucially, still waiting for you even after you`ve changed.
Coming from Saul Williams, a musician and poet shaped by spoken-word politics and hip-hop`s argument with power, the sentiment also reads as a survival ethic. Music becomes infrastructure: something you can lose jobs, lovers, countries - but the sound stays available, waiting to be re-entered. There`s a subtle comfort here, but not the soft kind. It is steadier: an insistence that culture outlasts individual crises and that expression is not a luxury item, it`s a constant.
The subtext also pushes against gatekeeping. If music is "always there", it can`t be fully owned by industries, critics, or scenes. People can be excluded from venues, priced out of festivals, algorithmically siloed - yet the underlying human impulse to make rhythm and melody persists. Williams is pointing at music as a commons: endlessly reinterpreted, never exhausted, and, crucially, still waiting for you even after you`ve changed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Saul
Add to List
