Art & Creativity Quote by Alexis Korner

There is a bracing honesty in admitting the goal wasn’t virtuosity, fame, or even beauty, but damage: “make music hurt.” Korner frames guitar not as a hobby but as a weaponized language, something sharp enough to press on a bruise. The first sentence is almost childlike in its simplicity, a plain desire for a tool. The second reveals why the tool mattered. He’s after impact, not decoration.

Coming from Korner, the British blues architect who helped route American blues electricity into the UK’s postwar bloodstream, the line lands as a cultural statement as much as a personal one. Early British rock wasn’t born in comfort; it was forged in austerity, class grit, and a restless hunger for authenticity. “Hurt” here isn’t melodrama. It’s the aesthetic of the blues translated for a new audience: bent notes like winces, rhythm as insistence, amplification as pressure.

The subtext is a corrective to polite musicianship. Korner is rejecting the idea that music’s job is to soothe. He’s also hinting at what the blues offered young British players: permission to sound imperfect, strained, raw, to let feeling outrun finesse. In a scene that would soon produce the Rolling Stones, Clapton, and a thousand guitar heroes, Korner’s intent reads almost prophetic: the point of the instrument is not to show you how good you are, but to prove you’ve felt something real enough to leave a mark.