Creativity Quote by Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix isn’t romanticizing gangs so much as puncturing the fantasy that any city is fully “civilized.” The line lands with the casual authority of someone who toured constantly, moving through backstage corridors and unfamiliar streets, clocking the same social geometry everywhere: a center that markets itself as safe and shiny, and an edge where the people labeled “problem” get pushed.

The key move is his pairing of “gang” with “the so-called outcasts.” “Gang” suggests threat and cohesion; “outcasts” suggests loneliness and failure. By yoking them, Hendrix exposes how much of that difference is branding. Some groups are named as danger because they’re visible, young, poor, racialized, or simply inconvenient. The “so-called” is doing heavy work: it’s an eye-roll at the respectable world’s need to invent a category for anyone who doesn’t fit its economy or its manners. He’s not denying violence exists; he’s pointing at the social reflex to turn complexity into a label.

Context matters: late-1960s urban unrest, policing, and a rapidly commercializing counterculture that sold rebellion while surveilling the people most damaged by the status quo. Hendrix, a Black rock star navigating both adoration and hostility, understood how quickly society decides who belongs. The quote reads like a musician’s street-level sociology: every city has its soundtrack, and every soundtrack has a bassline of exclusion. The “always” isn’t exaggeration; it’s an indictment of how reliably cities manufacture margins.