Creativity Quote by Alan Price

There is a bruised tenderness in Alan Price's phrasing: the Animals weren't just a lineup, they were an idea of themselves. "A particular concept" sounds almost managerial, but he means identity in the street-level sense: a shared stance, a posture you could hear in the snarl of the organ and the grit of the vocals. Calling it "anarchic" isn't romantic window-dressing. It's a claim about ethos: a band as a small, self-governing unit running on impulse, chemistry, and refusal to be tidied up.

Then comes the passive violence of the second clause. "Flattened" is the tell. Commercialization doesn't simply change art; it compresses it, sanding down angles that make it dangerous, distinctive, alive. Price stacks the culprits - "designs, attitudes, and needs" - to show how the squeeze works from multiple directions. Designs are the plans of labels and managers. Attitudes are the creeping assumptions: radio-friendly, marketable, brand-consistent. Needs are the most tragic part, because they're human: rent, careers, security, the fear of disappearing. He's admitting that the machine isn't only external; it recruits your own survival instincts.

The subtext is a familiar 60s story told from inside the engine room. A working-class band with genuine volatility gets discovered, then processed. Price isn't posturing as a purity cop. He's mourning a specific kind of freedom that existed briefly, before success demanded a simpler version of who they were. The line reads like an elegy for a band that knew itself, then watched that self become a product.