Life's Pleasures Quote by Michael Giles

A musician admitting ignorance about drugs in the late-20th-century rock ecosystem is never just ignorance; it’s a careful form of self-placement. Michael Giles’s line has the plainspoken shrug of someone refusing the script that audiences, journalists, and mythmakers keep trying to hand him. In a culture that routinely treats “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” as a single marketing slogan, “I still don’t know” reads like a quiet act of dissent: don’t make me your cautionary tale, don’t make me your decadent hero.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Still” suggests the question has been posed repeatedly, maybe obsessively, as if proximity to music automatically implies proximity to narcotics. The list structure - “anything about drugs, or who takes them, or what happens” - widens the gap, moving from substance to community to consequence. He’s not only denying personal experience; he’s declining to become an authority, or even a voyeur. That matters in an interview economy that rewards the lurid anecdote and punishes the boring truth.

There’s also a strategic innocence here: a way to keep the conversation from collapsing into moral theater. Giles sidesteps both confession and condemnation. He doesn’t sermonize; he doesn’t brag. He just withholds the kind of detail that turns musicians into either tabloid copy or public-health parables. The subtext is about boundaries: you can listen to the work without owning the private mythology.