Creativity Quote by Billy Sheehan

Sheehan is doing something sly here: he’s defending virtuosity by pretending he’s not defending anything at all. The line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a manifesto for how new musical languages get invented. “Standard rules” is a loaded phrase in bass culture, where the instrument has long been cast as supportive infrastructure, not a frontline voice. By naming the rules and then calmly stepping over them, Sheehan frames his flash, speed, and harmonic ambition not as ego, but as continuity with a broader artistic tradition.

The key move is the pivot from “I” to “many musicians.” He’s laundering what could sound like self-mythologizing through a collective precedent: the players we celebrate didn’t ask permission. That’s also a preemptive rebuttal to the purists. If you criticize my approach, you’re not protecting “the music,” you’re protecting a social order inside music - who gets to be heard, who stays in the back, what counts as taste.

Context matters: Sheehan emerged when rock and metal were turning technique into spectacle, and the bass was being reimagined by figures like Jaco Pastorius and Geddy Lee as melodic, percussive, even lead-capable. The subtext is less “rules are bad” than “rules are provisional.” Mastery, in this view, isn’t obedience; it’s knowing the tradition well enough to bend it until it becomes your signature.