Creativity Quote by Gavin Rossdale

Rossdale’s defense of the Sex Pistols is less about rewriting punk history than about rescuing a messy origin story from the tidy morality plays we like to impose on it. “People are too hard” points to a familiar backlash: once punk became a global aesthetic and a profitable genre, the Pistols got recast as either frauds (a Malcolm McLaren product) or villains (nihilists who poisoned youth). Rossdale pushes back with a blunt metric that cuts through the cosplay of authenticity: money.

“The Pistols started the whole punk thing” isn’t a scholarly claim so much as a reminder of impact. Punk isn’t born in a vacuum of pure intent; it’s born when a band detonates a scene and gives disaffected kids a usable template. Rossdale, who came up in the post-punk, alternative pipeline where rebellion was already a brand language, knows how easy it is to sneer at the first movers once the dust settles.

The kicker is “never saw much money,” a line that reframes them as workers, not myth. It’s a quiet indictment of the music industry’s ability to monetize cultural shock while underpaying the people who generate it. Rossdale’s subtext: if you’re going to accuse the Pistols of selling out, at least acknowledge they didn’t get paid like sellouts.

It’s also self-protective in a revealing way. A successful ’90s rock frontman defending punk’s original lightning rod is really defending the legitimacy of every act that came after: yes, commerce got involved; no, that automatically invalidates the noise that started it.