Creativity Quote by Evan Dando

There is a particular kind of self-own that only a working musician can deliver with that much offhand charm: Evan Dando diagnosing a whole national music-video vibe as "too serious", then shrugging, "We haven't got it together". The line reads like casual touring-talk, but it’s really an argument about pop as a native language. In the U.S., where MTV-era visual culture trained bands to sell a mood as much as a song, "making videos" isn’t documentation; it’s performance, wit, editing, fashion, a stance. Seriousness is the enemy because it confuses sincerity with gravity, and gravity with credibility.

Dando’s phrasing does a lot of work. "Ya have to" is half practical advice, half resignation to the American entertainment machine. "Usually ours" implies a pattern bigger than his own band: a quiet critique of a scene that equates artistic worth with dourness, as if playfulness were a sellout. Coming from the Lemonheads frontman - a figure associated with shaggy melodic immediacy, cover versions that outshine their "importance", and a kind of slacker elegance - the jab lands as aesthetic self-defense. He’s protecting a sensibility where lightness is not emptiness; it’s confidence.

The subtext is insecurity dressed as humor: American pop knows how to make images that look effortless, even when they’re engineered to death. Dando admires that fluency and resents what it exposes. "We haven't got it together" isn’t just technical; it’s cultural - a recognition that without an instinct for spectacle, you risk being mistaken for profound when you’re really just stiff.