Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Jenkinson’s line lands like an anti-manifesto in an era that treats music as a treadmill with analytics. “Keep up” isn’t just about tempo or output; it’s the whole attention-economy script where relevance is measured in frequency, visibility, and trend alignment. He frames that impulse as a “one-dimensional…race,” a blunt diagnosis of what happens when artists start composing for the feed: you narrow your choices to whatever can be quantified, compared, and beaten.

The phrasing matters. “I don’t know that” is a characteristically musicianly hedge, less indecision than refusal to play the pundit. It signals craft over proclamation: he’s not selling a lifestyle brand of authenticity, he’s describing a working method. Then comes the quiet trapdoor of “setting yourself into” - as if the race isn’t an external mandate but a self-installed constraint. The real antagonist here is internalized competition, the way creators adopt the platform’s logic until it feels like their own ambition.

Contextually, it fits Jenkinson’s career as Squarepusher: virtuosic, technically obsessive, but allergic to being domesticated by genre lanes. His music often performs speed while sidestepping the idea of progress as linear improvement. The subtext is that “keeping up” makes you legible, not interesting. If you’re always reacting, you’re never building a world; you’re just optimizing a lap time.