Creativity Quote by Tom Verlaine

Verlaine is drawing a line in the sand between spectacle and substance, and he does it with the kind of offhand bluntness that made punk-era credibility feel like a currency you could actually spend. The phrase "big media gimmick band" isn’t just an insult; it’s a refusal of the machinery that turns music into branding. He’s not denying that Television had an image - every band does - he’s insisting it wasn’t engineered to be consumed.

The Kiss comparison lands because Kiss was the era’s most legible shorthand for rock as product: face paint, pyrotechnics, characters you could sell on a lunchbox. By invoking them, Verlaine isn’t arguing about musical quality so much as the terms of engagement with an audience. Kiss offers a ready-made mythology; Verlaine positions Television as anti-myth, allergic to costume, closer to an art scene that prized distance and difficulty.

"cultivated appearance" is the tell. It suggests not just dressing up, but tending, curating, managing the self. Verlaine’s subtext is that authenticity isn’t a vibe; it’s a practice of not polishing away the awkward edges for mass appeal. In the mid-70s New York context - CBGB, downtown minimalism, a press industry eager to package "punk" into a look - this reads like preemptive damage control. He’s arguing for the band’s right to be misread as plain, even unimpressive, if that’s what it takes to keep the music from becoming a costume drama.