Creativity Quote by Ritchie Blackmore

Blackmore’s jab lands because it’s a musician’s version of an aesthetic manifesto, delivered with the dry impatience of someone who’s watched rock performance turn into competitive gymnastics. “Leaping around” concedes that spectacle is part of the job; the qualifier “with class” draws a hard line between theatricality and clowning. He’s not rejecting movement, he’s policing taste.

The specificity does the heavy lifting. “Jumping up in the air and doing the splits” isn’t an abstract complaint about “kids these days”; it’s a vivid caricature of the late-’70s/’80s hard-rock arms race, when stagecraft increasingly borrowed from cheerleading, hair metal bravado, and MTV-friendly stunts. By choosing an image that feels both athletic and a little ridiculous, Blackmore frames that era’s physicality as a cheap substitute for musicianship. The splits become a punchline: the body doing what the guitar used to do.

There’s also a class signal here in the British sense of the word: restraint, control, self-respect. Blackmore came up when guitar heroes projected authority by seeming unbothered, even while playing ferociously. His ideal performer moves like a fencer, not an acrobat. Underneath the snark is an older rock ethic: intensity should read as mastery, not desperation for applause.

It’s a protective statement, too. Blackmore’s brand was always precision and a slightly aristocratic remove; admitting that “class” matters is a way of defending identity in a genre that constantly_toggle between art and circus.