I once asked the artist-music producer Brian Eno about Zappa, who seemed to share a similar craving to create an experimental collage of influences from pop culture and the avant-garde, and he said, well, he was a big influence, but in reverse – ‘He’d showed me exactly what I should not be doing. He fused together all the wrong things. I did not like his music, but I am very grateful that he did it. Sometimes you learn as much from the things you don’t like as from the things you do like. The rejection side is as important as the endorsement part. You define who you are and where you are by the things that you know you are not. Sometimes that’s all the information you have to go on.