Creativity Quote by Les Baxter

A quiet line like this lands as a low-grade indictment, the kind musicians learn to deliver without sounding bitter - even when they are. Baxter frames it as almost accidental ignorance on the label's part ("I don't think... is aware"), but the follow-up snaps the mask into place: "they just bury my albums". That's not neglect; it's institutional choice. The deadpan pacing is doing work here: he starts with plausible deniability and ends with an image of deliberate disposal.

Coming from Les Baxter, it carries extra sting. Baxter helped define mid-century easy listening and exotica - lush, orchestrated mood music engineered for fantasy. By the time rock-era economics and "authenticity" became the industry religion, that kind of craft could be treated like yesterday's upholstery: still functional, newly unfashionable. The subtext is about gatekeeping disguised as market logic. A record company doesn't have to hate you to erase you; it just has to decide you no longer fit the story it's selling.

The phrase "bury my albums" is both vivid and procedural, suggesting warehouses, release schedules, internal politics, and the quiet violence of catalogs left to rot. Baxter isn't asking to be celebrated; he's pointing to a system where the artist's output can be effectively confiscated by ownership. It's a musician describing censorship without the drama of a censor - just the banal, businesslike kind that happens when art becomes inventory and the easiest way to manage it is to make it disappear.