Art & Creativity Quote by Bret Michaels

Michaels is drawing a bright line between hunger and hunger-for-approval, and he knows exactly how provocative that sounds coming from a man who built a career in arena-sized spectacle. The punch of the quote is its blunt moral math: chasing "it" (hits, trends, virality, the approval economy) doesn’t just dilute your sound, it actively "destroys" music. That overstatement is the point. He’s not offering a musicology seminar; he’s policing a code.

The subtext is defensive and intimate. In rock, authenticity isn’t just an aesthetic, it’s a shield against being dismissed as manufactured. Michaels is arguing that the only durable permission slip is feeling - if you play what you truly feel, you can survive changing fashions and the snobbery that comes with them. "Chasing it" is also a quiet indictment of the industry machine: radio formulas, label notes, streaming-era optimization, and now social-media strategy dressed up as artistry. He’s treating those pressures as corrosive, not neutral.

Context matters: Michaels comes from a late-80s hair-metal world that was famously flattened by a new authenticity wave in the early 90s. For artists from that era, "real" became a cudgel used against them. So the line doubles as a retrospective claim to legitimacy: even if the look was loud, the impulse was sincere.

Why it works is the simplicity. Two paths, two outcomes, one value. It’s a rock-and-roll ethic compressed into a warning label: trend-chasing buys you attention now, but it costs you the only thing audiences can’t stream on demand - conviction.