Creativity Quote by Nuno Bettencourt

Nuno Bettencourt is dodging the myth of the band as a sealed-off universe. The line is casual, even self-effacing, but the point is firm: if you make loud, public art inside a loud, public culture, you end up sounding like your era whether you mean to or not. The phrasing matters. “I don’t think you have a choice” strips away rock’s favorite pose - total autonomy - and replaces it with a musician’s reality: you absorb what’s in the air, then you translate it through amps and attitude. The repeated softeners (“sort of,” “somewhat”) read less like uncertainty than like an allergy to overclaiming, a way of acknowledging influence without turning it into a brand strategy.

The context is Extreme’s odd placement in the late ’80s/early ’90s: virtuoso hard rock arriving right as glam was curdling, grunge was about to reset the aesthetic, and MTV was turning bands into fast-moving symbols. Extreme could shred and still write a left-field pop-soul hit (“More Than Words”), which made them both ubiquitous and easy to misread. Bettencourt’s subtext is a quiet defense against that flattening: if a band’s sound shifts, or if it carries the sheen of its moment, that’s not necessarily capitulation. It’s evidence of being alive to the cultural weather.

He’s also admitting a more uncomfortable truth: “influence of the times” isn’t just musical trends. It’s politics, media, masculinity, commerce - the whole ecosystem that decides what counts as authentic, and when.