Creativity Quote by Kenny Hickey

Stage fright is usually framed as a vulnerability problem; Kenny Hickey treats it like a perception problem. By collapsing a room full of individuals into "one single entity", he’s describing a blunt mental hack: shrink the number of relationships you have to manage. A crowd becomes weather, not witnesses. That’s where the line lands with a cold little jolt: "I dehumanize the audience". He chooses an ethically charged verb on purpose, because it admits the trade-off. You gain control by refusing intimacy.

For a working musician, this isn’t abstract theory; it’s occupational survival. Live performance demands emotional openness while punishing over-sensitivity. Hickey’s method is a kind of dissociation that lets him function: if the audience is not a thousand separate judgments, there’s no single face to disappoint, no private story to collide with your own. Anxiety thrives on imagined specificity; he blurs the image until it can’t bite.

The subtext is also about power. Fans are often sold as a community, a family, a "beautiful connection". Hickey punctures that marketing language and tells the backstage truth: the performer sometimes has to turn people into a mass just to do the job. It’s a reminder that the intimacy of concerts can be one-sided, carefully engineered, and occasionally protective rather than sincere. In a culture that demands authenticity on command, this is an oddly honest confession of artifice.