Wealth & Money Quote by Siouxsie Sioux

The sting in Siouxsie Sioux's complaint is that it isn't nostalgic hand-wringing so much as a diagnosis of how culture gets manufactured. She frames the "industry" as a machine that has stopped taking creative risks, swapping patronage for prediction. "No bands get nurtured anymore" isn't just about money; it's about time, patience, and the right to be weird in public long enough to get good. Nurturing implies apprenticeship and evolution. Top Ten logic implies a pre-certified product.

Her phrasing turns the economics into an ethical argument. Calling it "offensive" to spend $2 million on a video hits like a moral rebuke: excess isn't neutral when it's attached to conformity. The budget becomes a symbol of misplaced values - spectacle over substance, marketing over musicianship, image over infrastructure. In her world, that kind of spend isn't investment, it's distortion: a huge megaphone handed to whatever already sounds safest.

Context matters because Siouxsie is speaking from inside a lineage that benefited from the old model's contradictions: post-punk and goth acts were once risky, misfit propositions that labels still gambled on, sometimes because they didn't know what would stick, sometimes because subculture was the R&D department of pop. Her anger is the anger of someone watching the pipeline from underground to mainstream get paved over. The subtext is bleakly practical: when labels only bankroll certainty, they don't just reflect taste - they shrink it.