Creativity Quote by John Fahey

Celebrity is a lease, not a relationship, and John Fahey is describing the moment the paperwork catches up. His line isn’t really about “groupies” as individuals; it’s about a particular economy of attention where devotion is contingent on the fantasy staying intact. The instant the idol displays ordinary fallibility, the fan doesn’t merely drift away. They “turn on you.” That verb choice matters: it frames the reversal as punitive, almost prosecutorial, as if the admirer has been cheated out of a product they believed they purchased.

Fahey, a musician whose mystique often leaned on the singular and the strange, is pointing to a trap built into modern fame: you’re encouraged to be human in your art and inhuman in your personal life. The subtext is exhaustion. Being adored for a persona can feel less like love than surveillance, because adoration at that pitch comes with an unspoken demand for consistency, purity, and endless availability. An “error in everyday life” becomes evidence in a case the audience is already primed to try.

There’s also a defensive bitterness here, the voice of someone who’s watched intimacy get weaponized. “Like everybody else does” is his plea for proportionality, a reminder that the standards applied to public figures are often less moral than theatrical. Fahey’s complaint lands now because we’ve industrialized the turn: the cycle from fascination to disgust is the algorithm’s favorite plot twist, and humanity is the spoiler.