Creativity Quote by Kristin Hersh

A musician admitting she mostly doesn’t like what the radio plays isn’t snobbery so much as a diagnosis of the system. Kristin Hersh’s line lands with a shruggy bluntness that feels earned: radio isn’t a neutral pipeline for “the best” songs, it’s a market device built to minimize risk. Her intent is simple - personal taste - but the subtext is infrastructural. If you make idiosyncratic, emotionally jagged work (as Hersh has, from Throwing Muses onward), mainstream rotation can feel like a closed loop: the same chord progressions, the same vocal affect, the same lyrical vagueness engineered to offend no one and hook everyone.

What makes the quote work is its modesty. She doesn’t grandstand about “real music” or lecture listeners. “For the most part” is the tell: it signals discernment rather than blanket contempt, leaving room for the rare track that cuts through the formatting. That restraint sharpens the critique, because it suggests she’s listening and still unimpressed.

Context matters, too. Hersh comes from a lineage where alternative wasn’t just a genre tag; it was a survival strategy against commercial homogeneity. In the post-Nirvana era, “alternative” got absorbed into radio’s machinery, turning rebellion into another preset. So her line reads as both personal boundary and cultural weather report: if the dial feels creatively stagnant, it’s not because artists stopped making strange, vital music. It’s because radio stopped being designed to find it.