Life's Pleasures Quote by Lita Ford

The joke lands because it’s petty, specific, and perfectly rock-and-roll: Lita Ford takes a mundane piece of promo culture and flips it into a one-line protest. Read it as a musician’s deadpan jab at an industry that treats lifestyle branding like oxygen. The “they” is doing a lot of work here - record labels, publicists, magazines, gatekeepers who decide who gets included, courted, reviewed, circulated. A “copy” is supposed to be standard: the free advance, the comp, the backstage pass disguised as marketing. Ford’s twist is that access isn’t about merit or even music; it’s about proximity to the right habits, the right vices, the right hang.

The subtext is gendered without announcing itself. In hard rock and metal, especially around Ford’s era, authenticity was often measured by performative damage: cigarettes, booze, chaos, the “real” musician as self-consuming outlaw. By saying she doesn’t smoke, Ford points to the absurdity of that metric - and the quiet punishment for not playing along. It’s not a moral speech; it’s a shrug that exposes a system where conformity to a scene’s rituals matters more than your actual output.

Culturally, it captures how scenes police belonging through tiny signals. A cigarette becomes a credential, and the absence of one becomes a disqualifier. Ford’s line is funny because it’s plausible, but it stings because it’s also how soft exclusion works: no memo, no confrontation, just no “copy” on your doorstep.