Creativity Quote by Alexis Korner

Korner’s line is a sly defense of scenes, not just stars. He’s pushing back against the romantic idea that talent emerges in pristine isolation, as if the “real” musician would have done it anyway. In his view, the dirty secret of every breakout movement is scale: once something gets loud enough, it becomes a gateway drug. The movement creates permission, a social script, a set of heroes, a cheap guitar economy, a reason to endure being terrible in public long enough to get good.

The subtext is both generous and corrective. Generous because it credits collective momentum for individual greatness; corrective because it punctures purist gatekeeping. If some later great player only picked up an instrument because skiffle, blues-rock, punk, or whatever made it feel possible, Korner’s basically saying: good. That’s not fraud, that’s how culture works. “Incentive” matters as much as “aptitude,” and a movement’s real success isn’t only the canonical recordings but the second-order effects: the kids in back rooms, the local bands, the future innovators who first entered through imitation.

Context matters: Korner helped midwife British blues, a scene often accused of being derivative. His point doubles as a justification for that ecosystem. Even if a movement produces plenty of copyists and opportunists, the sheer volume guarantees a few serious voices rise out of the noise. Greatness, he implies, is partly an accident engineered by community.