Creativity Quote by Paul Kantner

Kantner’s gripe lands because it turns a whole sensory era into an office metaphor. A rock concert as a “business meeting” isn’t just “less fun”; it’s a diagnosis: the music still plays, but the room has changed. Where a classic rock show once promised volatility - a communal gamble between band and crowd - the modern version can feel pre-scripted, optimized, and risk-averse, like everyone is there to execute a plan rather than chase a moment.

The specific intent is to mourn the loss of danger and intimacy that defined the late-’60s/early-’70s counterculture Kantner came out of with Jefferson Airplane/Starship. Those concerts weren’t merely performances; they were social experiments, tangled up with psychedelia, politics, and the idea that an audience could be a temporary society. Calling today’s shows “business meetings” needles the way big tours run on professionalized machinery: corporate sponsorship, VIP tiers, timed cues, video walls, brand-safe banter, and a security footprint that makes spontaneity feel like a liability.

The subtext is also self-implicating. The generation that built rock into a mass cultural force also helped turn it into an industry that can’t afford surprise. “Compared to what they were” carries an insider’s authority and a quiet admission that nostalgia isn’t just sentiment - it’s an index of how art changes once it becomes legacy. Kantner isn’t arguing that concerts are bad now; he’s arguing they’ve been domesticated, traded from rupture to routine, from shared delirium to deliverables.