Creativity Quote by Brian Molko

There is a delicious recoil built into Molko's line: a refusal of responsibility framed like a public-service announcement, as if the world is waiting to blame a rock singer for an outbreak of pallor. The phrasing ("held responsible", "bringing back") borrows the language of moral panic and civic consequence, then swerves into the petty, bodily detail of "pasty-faced people" - a jab that lands because it's so unserious while pretending to be grave.

The specific intent reads like a preemptive dodge of celebrity causality. Molko is batting away the idea that an artist can be faulted for what fans imitate: the look, the mood, the aesthetic of cultivated sleeplessness. In the late-90s/early-2000s ecosystem that Placebo helped soundtrack, "pasty" isn't just skin tone; it's a whole posture: indoor living, androgyny, glamour-as-defiance, a kind of beautiful anemia that functioned as armor against the bronzed, lad-mag mainstream. When subcultures get absorbed, they also get caricatured, and this line plays defense with a sneer.

The subtext is also about agency. Fans want icons, the media wants simple cause-and-effect narratives, and Molko insists on the messier truth: people choose their disguises. By making the supposed offense so absurdly cosmetic, he exposes how critics often police aesthetics as a proxy for policing identity. It's a smart, slippery way to say: don't pin your anxieties on my eyeliner.