Wit & Attitude Quote by Joe Elliott

Joe Elliott is doing a very rock-star thing here: admitting pleasure in a supposedly uncool pop artifact, then immediately exposing the weird social choreography required to enjoy it. “Crazy Horses,” by the Osmonds, isn’t just a guilty pleasure to him; it’s a secretly influential banger that musicians keep rescuing in rehearsal rooms and cover sets. That detail matters. Covers are how bands confess their real tastes to each other, even when the public-facing brand demands tougher, purer, more “credible” influences.

The brown paper bag is the punchline and the diagnosis. It’s shoplifting imagery without the crime: shame packaged as privacy. Elliott came up in a Britain where heavy rock masculinity was policed by taste - you could like melodic hooks, sure, but you were supposed to pretend they arrived through “serious” channels. The Osmonds, with their family-friendly gloss, represented a kind of cultural contamination for a budding metal identity. So he smuggles it home like contraband.

He’s also quietly rewriting the rock canon. By calling it “just a great song,” he shifts the argument from tribe to craft: a riff is a riff, a groove is a groove, regardless of who’s wearing the matching outfits. The subtext is generosity and self-defense at once: if even the Osmonds can write something that outlives its image, then the whole hierarchy of cool is flimsy, and musicians know it first.