Cate Blanchett credited as playing...
Jude
- Jude: You know, saying 'cause of peace', it's like saying, 'hunk of butter', you know, I don't want you to listen to anybody who wants you to believe is dedicated to the hunk and not the butter.
- Reporter: I'm not sure I follow.
- Jude: You know, I didn't come out of some cereal box. There's no one out there who's gonna be converted by a song.
- Jude: Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels - I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead. You'd think that these traditional music people would - would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they're all so full of mystery.
- Keenan Jones: And contradictions.
- Jude: Yeah, contradictions.
- Keenan Jones: And chaos.
- Jude: Yes, it's chaos, clocks, and watermelons - you know, it's - it's everything. These people actually think I have some kind of, uh... fantastic imagination. It gets very, uh, lonesome. But traditional music is just, uh... it's too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. You know, I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it. Has to do with, like, uh, the purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer.
- Jude: I mean what do you care if I care, or don't care, what's it to you? All right, what if I said I never cared about, you know, folk music? About, you know, protest songs? It was all about jumping into a scene. You know I was never going to stay there. I mean, I just... I knew I could do it better than anybody else.
- Keenan Jones: Yes, I was going to ask Mr. Quinn why he insists on putting us and the rest of the world on so? Some might be persuaded to doubt his sincerity.
- Jude: Well, who said I was sincere?
- Keenan Jones: Are you saying you're not sincere?
- Jude: No more than you, you know? No more sincere than you are. See, you just want me to say what you want me to say.
- [first lines]
- Narrator: There he lies. God rest his soul, and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness, and his phone numbers. There he lay: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity. Nailed by a peeping tom, who would soon discover...
- Jude: A poem is like a naked person...
- Narrator: - even the ghost was more than one person.
- Arthur: ...but a song is something that walks by itself.