"I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words"
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Success is the easy headline; Peter Garrett is pointing at what survives the headline. Coming from a frontman best known for turning protest into pop velocity, his line reads like a quiet refusal to let chart position be mistaken for artistic or moral outcome. “I guess for me” is doing strategic work: it softens the declaration, sidestepping preachiness while still drawing a boundary around what he’s willing to measure. The real pivot is “more significant than success” - not anti-success, but suspicious of it, like it’s a metric that can be bought, gamed, or detached from meaning.
He then narrows the frame to “the nature of each of the songs and of the words,” which is both craft talk and conscience talk. Nature implies character: what the song is made of, what it’s trying to do, what it’s willing to compromise. And “words” matters because Garrett’s kind of rock doesn’t treat lyrics as wallpaper; it treats them as evidence. In the late 20th-century ecosystem where bands got packaged into brands, that insistence reads as a defensive move against being flattened into an image: the tall activist frontman, the anthemic chorus, the arena-ready politics.
The subtext is also self-protective. If you anchor your sense of worth to “success,” you’re volunteering for the industry’s mood swings. If you anchor it to the integrity of individual songs, you keep agency. It’s a musician admitting that legacy isn’t a trophy shelf; it’s a body of work you can stand behind when the applause moves on.
He then narrows the frame to “the nature of each of the songs and of the words,” which is both craft talk and conscience talk. Nature implies character: what the song is made of, what it’s trying to do, what it’s willing to compromise. And “words” matters because Garrett’s kind of rock doesn’t treat lyrics as wallpaper; it treats them as evidence. In the late 20th-century ecosystem where bands got packaged into brands, that insistence reads as a defensive move against being flattened into an image: the tall activist frontman, the anthemic chorus, the arena-ready politics.
The subtext is also self-protective. If you anchor your sense of worth to “success,” you’re volunteering for the industry’s mood swings. If you anchor it to the integrity of individual songs, you keep agency. It’s a musician admitting that legacy isn’t a trophy shelf; it’s a body of work you can stand behind when the applause moves on.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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