Creativity Quote by Anthony Braxton

Braxton’s line lands like a weary improvisation: the sound of someone stepping out of the neat boxes other people keep trying to close around him. “All of the ‘isms,’ all of the communities” isn’t just a swipe at labels; it’s a critique of how cultural scenes (especially in avant-garde music) turn identity, politics, and aesthetics into membership cards. The irony is that community, the thing that’s supposed to hold you, can become a machinery for use.

The key verb is “misused.” He’s not claiming he’s misunderstood in some romantic way; he’s saying groups can treat an artist as proof. Proof of a theory, a movement, a lineage, a righteous stance. Braxton has been claimed and repurposed across jazz, “experimental,” Black music discourse, academic new music, and any number of critical factions. Each wants him as an emblem, not always as a person with changing interests and an unruly catalog.

Then he flips the moral math: “But that is OK.” Not because exploitation is noble, but because invisibility is worse. “Misused than neglected” is the survival logic of an artist who knows how gatekeeping works: you can be appropriated, canonized, argued over, even tokenized - and still get heard. Neglect is the real erasure, the quiet failure of institutions, critics, and audiences to show up at all.

The subtext feels bracingly unsentimental. Braxton isn’t asking for purity from communities; he’s admitting the trade-offs. He’d rather risk being instrumentalized than disappear. In a culture that loves branding, his statement is a refusal to confuse belonging with freedom, while conceding the brutal fact that attention, even warped attention, keeps the music alive.