Life & Mortality Quote by Keith Richards

Richards is drawing a bright, almost moral line between music as a lived, bodily craft and music as a product assembled at arm's length. The first sentence sounds simple, even homespun, but it’s doing careful cultural work: “people playing together” isn’t nostalgia for a band in a room so much as a claim about where authority comes from. Not from software, not from solitary perfectionism, but from a shared momentum where musicians “know what they want to do” and commit before the world gives them permission.

The phrase “sweat over it and bug it to death” is Richards at his most instructive: good music isn’t magic, it’s stubbornness. “Bug it” turns creativity into a kind of pestering interrogation. You worry a song like a loose tooth until it gives up its secret. That’s a very Rolling Stones ethos: the groove earned through repetition, not discovered through presets.

Then comes the jab: “pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.” He’s not literally denying the existence of electronic music so much as rejecting a cultural drift toward frictionless creation. Buttons imply shortcuts, screens imply mediation, the artist reduced to a consumer of their own process. Coming from a guitarist who helped define the swagger of analog rock, it reads as both craft talk and defensive manifesto: a reminder that rock’s claim to authenticity is social (a band), physical (sweat), and risky (going for it). The subtext is anxiety about an era where “making music” can mean avoiding other humans, avoiding failure, avoiding the room. Richards is arguing that the room is the point.