Creativity Quote by Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr’s joke lands because it’s a perfect little grenade tossed at the altar of high culture. “I like Beethoven” is the kind of sentence people use to audition as Serious, then he swerves: “especially the poems.” It’s a deliberate category error, and the point isn’t ignorance so much as the performance of ignorance. Ringo, a man whose entire public persona trades in affable plainspokenness, punctures the idea that taste has to be credentialed to count.

The intent is comedic, but the subtext is social. Beethoven often functions less as a composer than as a cultural password, a way to signal education, refinement, class. By pretending to misunderstand what Beethoven even is, Ringo exposes how flimsy that signaling can be. If you can’t tell whether someone is sincerely mistaken or slyly mocking you, the hierarchy starts to wobble. The line also flips the script on rock’s longstanding inferiority complex: pop musicians are expected to defer to the canon, to treat “classical” as the grown-up table. Ringo turns that deference into a punchline.

Context matters: coming out of the Beatles era, Starr was constantly framed as the “simple” one, the lovable everyman in a band of perceived geniuses. He weaponizes that stereotype with perfect timing. It’s not anti-Beethoven; it’s anti-pretension. The joke suggests that music’s real power isn’t in the museum label but in the listening, and that reverence without joy is just another costume.