Art & Creativity Quote by Tom Araya

There’s a particular kind of honesty in the shrug embedded here: the moment a scene stops feeling like discovery and starts feeling like wallpaper. Tom Araya isn’t trashing the 70s so much as marking the instant when music stopped being a private obsession and became ambient culture. “I remember all the songs” lands like an accusation against memory itself - not proof of love, just evidence of saturation. You can know every chorus in the supermarket without ever choosing it.

Coming from a musician whose identity is tied to extremity, speed, and confrontation, the line reads as a self-portrait of taste hardening into a boundary. For someone who helped define thrash’s harsh clarity, a lot of 70s radio rock can register as overfamiliar, overplayed, domesticated. The ellipsis after “just wasn’t...” does the real work: it’s less a critique of craft than a refusal to complete the thought, because the problem isn’t the songs; it’s the relationship to them. The culture made them unavoidable, and that robbed them of intimacy.

The subtext is also generational. Araya’s coming of age happens right as rock turns into an industry with a greatest-hits conveyor belt. His “you know what I mean?” is a small bid for recognition from anyone who’s had their tastes shaped by repetition rather than desire. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a statement of drift - how you can live inside music and still fall out of listening.