Eddie Murphy

Rolling Stone has an interview with Eddie Murphy conducted by Brian Hiatt. I can take Murphy or leave him alone as a performer, but I have to give him credit for seeming to have his head screwed on right.

This whole period of documenting an artist's work, movies, records, all this shit, it's 100 years old, if it's that. It's brand-new. Beethoven and those fuckers couldn't even listen to their shit, do you know how hard it was to find a mother fucker with a violin that worked back then? And his stuff went through the ages. Technology has it to where they gonna play this stuff forever. But the reality is, all this shit turns into dust, everything is temporary.

(And if stuff doesn't turn to dust, there will be so much of it that much of it will simply be buried in the hard drive of history. Any way you look at it, pop culture is evanescent.)

After all these years, I've done well and I'm cool. I feel comfortable in my skin, I've saved some paper, everybody's healthy, my kids are beautiful and smart, doing different things, it's all good. I'm trying to maintain my shit like this, and do a fun project every now and then.

Good for him. Not only does he deserve his leisure time, but by taking it, he frees up roles for younger performers.