Creativity Quote by Evan Dando

A perfect Gen X eye-roll disguised as a format critique. Evan Dando isn’t really reviewing CDs; he’s mocking the whole 90s promise that “cleaner” and “more efficient” automatically means better. “Totally corporate” is the tell: the complaint isn’t sonic fidelity, it’s ownership. CDs arrive as a sealed, standardized product, less like a discovered artifact and more like inventory. The medium becomes a metaphor for an industry that polishes away messiness until all that’s left is something you can stack, barcode, and sell.

The line works because it’s sensory, almost petty on purpose. “They don’t smell of anything” sounds like a joke, but it’s a serious point about how culture gets experienced. Vinyl and cassettes come with fingerprints: thrift-store dust, paper sleeves, tape hiss, the physical evidence of use and exchange. Smell stands in for history. A CD’s sterile neutrality reads as amnesia.

Calling them “cheap and soulless” flips the CD’s original marketing. The format was sold as premium futurism; Dando frames it as plastic minimalism pretending to be luxury. That’s a musician’s gripe, but also a consumer’s: the suspicion that the future is mostly a downgrade dressed up as progress.

Contextually, it lands in the era when alternative rock was being packaged for malls. Dando, forever adjacent to the mainstream but allergic to its sheen, turns a piece of hardware into a cultural diagnosis: when everything gets frictionless, it also gets forgettable.