Creativity Quote by Robyn Hitchcock

There is a sly trapdoor in Hitchcock's phrasing: he grants you the full, modern permission slip ("Everyone has a right") and then yanks the floor out ("the whole process is misleading"). It's the voice of a musician who's spent decades watching audiences chase transcendence the way they chase a perfect chorus: earnestly, repeatedly, and with a little self-deception baked in.

"Change their consciousness" carries the 20th-century baggage: psychedelics, meditation, therapy-speak, self-help, spiritual branding, even the romance of the tour bus epiphany. Hitchcock doesn't moralize about any one method. He frames it as a right, which nods to autonomy and experimentation, the countercultural idea that your mind is yours to remix. The turn comes with "ultimately" and "whole process" - two words that widen the indictment from any single practice to the larger story we tell ourselves about transformation.

The subtext is that altered states can feel like revelation while functioning as misdirection. The experience is real; the meaning we attach to it is the con. "Misleading" doesn't mean useless. It means the route promises a destination that keeps receding: enlightenment as a marketing funnel, catharsis as a subscription model, reinvention as an endless series of upgrades. In a pop culture economy that sells identity the way it sells records, Hitchcock punctures the fantasy that you can hack your way out of being human.

Coming from a songwriter, it's also a wink at art itself. Music changes consciousness all the time - and still, the song ends, the lights come up, and you're left with the same old self, just temporarily rearranged.