Art & Creativity Quote by Noel Coward

Coward lands the line like a raised eyebrow: the shock isn’t that music moves us, but that the bargain-bin stuff can hit hardest. “Extraordinary” signals amused disbelief, the voice of someone who prides himself on taste yet can’t deny the body’s reaction. “Potent” is a deliberately pharmaceutical word for something supposedly frivolous; cheap music doesn’t just entertain, it medicates, intoxicates, sedates. The sting is in the pairing of “potent” with “cheap,” a class critique compressed into five words.

As a playwright steeped in drawing-room manners and high-cultural self-consciousness, Coward is diagnosing a common hypocrisy: the cultivated person who scoffs at the popular tune, then finds it soldered to their nerves. The subtext is about vulnerability. Sentimentality is embarrassing in Coward’s world because it punctures composure, and “cheap music” is the stealth weapon that does it - bypassing reason, taste, and status.

Context matters: Coward wrote and performed during an era when mass entertainment (revues, radio, film songs) was exploding, and when “good” culture and “popular” culture were patrolled as separate territories. He’s not only mocking the masses; he’s mocking the elite’s belief that refinement equals immunity. The line doubles as a grudging respect for the craftsmanlike hooks of pop and a warning about how easily emotion can be engineered. Cheap doesn’t mean weak. It means efficient.