Creativity Quote by Sean Booth

Booth is taking a swing at a particular kind of comfort: the ready-made aesthetic that flatters you into thinking you authored it. The comparison to “getting in a building someone else has designed” isn’t about architecture so much as agency. A building arrives with decisions baked in - proportions, flow, assumptions about how a person should move through space. “Dress it up” is the humiliating afterthought: decoration as compensation for not controlling the structure. In music, presets work the same way. They don’t just offer a sound; they offer a worldview, a prepackaged set of taste claims with the rough edges already sanded down.

The intent here is less purist snobbery than a defense of process. Booth comes out of a lineage (Warp-era electronic music, studio-as-instrument thinking) where the point is to build the machine while you build the song. Presets are efficient, but efficiency is also a kind of cultural pressure: make it faster, make it legible, make it recognizable enough to be consumed. His disgust is directed at that subtle coercion. If you accept the prefab structure, your “choices” become surface-level - a new paint color on someone else’s floorplan.

Subtext: authenticity isn’t a vibe; it’s an engineering decision. Booth is arguing that authorship lives in constraints you set yourself, not in cosmetic tweaks to a system designed to produce agreeable results. In an era when software markets “instant pro” as a feature, his line reads like a refusal to outsource taste - or to let the tool quietly become the co-writer.