Creativity Quote by Alan Vega

Vega is drawing a hard line between performance as costume and performance as exposure. Coming from the co-founder of Suicide, a band that turned cheap electronics and street-level confrontation into art, the praise of “for real” isn’t a nostalgic plea for purity. It’s a demand that the audience feel risk. “You can tell right away” is doing a lot of work: it asserts authenticity as something sensed in the body before it’s argued in the mind, like a threat assessment or a gut-check. This is less about sincerity as morality than sincerity as voltage.

The word “intensity” is the tell. Vega isn’t talking about technical chops, tasteful restraint, or even polish. He’s describing the pressure behind the material - the sense that what’s coming off the stage has consequences for the person delivering it. “Real people” sounds casual, but it’s a rebuke to the entertainment economy’s habit of sanding down edges until artists read as brands. For Vega, the performer who’s “real” leaks something unmanageable: need, anger, hunger, obsession. That leakage becomes the proof.

Context matters: Vega came up in a New York where punk, performance art, and brutality were in the same room, where getting booed could be part of the set, where electronics were primitive and menace was a legitimate aesthetic. In that world, “real” isn’t an identity badge; it’s an atmosphere. He’s saying you can hear it when someone’s not hiding, and you can hear it when they are.