Music as compost

I read this great quote from Brian Eno, which is a really generous and interesting comment on apparent lack of originality in music.

If you think of culture as a great big garden, it has to have its compost as well. And lots of people are doing things that are ... not dramatic or radical or not even particularly interesting, they’re just digestive processes. It’s places where a number of little things are being combined and tried out. It’s like members of a population. We’re all little different turns of the same genetic dice. If you think about music in that way, it makes it much easier to accept that there might be lots of things you might not want to hear again. They happen and they pass and they become the compost for something else to grow from [laughs]. Gardening is such a good lesson for all sorts of things.

I guess he was working with U2 at the time. Ha!

Nah, but seriously, the image makes plenty of sense to me.

The quote's from a 1985 interview with Eno & John Cage, quoted in Eric Tamm's Brian Eno - His Music And The Vertical Colour of Sound.