Art & Creativity Quote by Brian Eno

Eno’s line lands like a shrug from someone who helped invent the very future he’s critiquing. “Aggressive music” isn’t just a genre tag here; it’s a strategy: volume, speed, distortion, taboo lyrics, the whole physiology of being jolted. Eno’s point is brutally practical: shock is a finite resource. The first time your nervous system gets hit with a new sonic threat, it spikes. The second time, you’re already building tolerance. After that, escalation becomes the only way to chase the original feeling, and the arms race starts to look less like rebellion and more like maintenance.

The subtext is a quiet demotion of “edginess” as an artistic goal. If your core currency is outrage or abrasion, you’re at the mercy of audience habituation and cultural desensitization. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s an observation about attention. Eno has always been more interested in music as an environment than as an attack, which makes this sound like a thesis for ambient: if shock decays, build worlds instead of detonations.

Context matters. Coming out of the post-60s era and into punk’s rupture, Eno watched transgression get absorbed, packaged, and resold with astonishing speed. “It’s inevitable” reads less like defeat than like a design constraint: art that lasts can’t rely on the startle reflex. It has to metabolize aggression into texture, idea, or emotion - something that doesn’t disappear the moment the listener learns the trick.