Creativity Quote by Boz Burrell

There’s a weary swagger in “I wouldn’t call myself a dinosaur” that only lands because it’s doing two things at once: dodging an insult and quietly naming the battlefield. In rock culture, “dinosaur” is never neutral. It’s shorthand for an artist who’s outlived the moment, still stomping around on old hits while the world updates its software. Burrell’s phrasing refuses the label without sounding defensive. The “wouldn’t” is key: it implies other people might, which makes the line less a proclamation than a sidestep, the kind musicians perfect after years of interviews that want them embalmed as an era.

As a bassist who moved through major, stylistically distinct bands (the prog precision of King Crimson, the hard-rock machinery of Bad Company), Burrell occupied a particular kind of mid-century rock career: talented, visible, but rarely treated as the mythic face of the brand. That makes the line read like an assertion of continued agency. He’s not insisting he’s “relevant”; he’s insisting he’s not a museum exhibit.

The subtext is also about aging without surrendering taste. Calling someone a dinosaur flatters the critic: it suggests the present is automatically smarter. Burrell’s resistance hints that longevity can be adaptation, not mere survival. And it’s wryly human: he doesn’t claim he’s young, just that the caricature is lazy. In one short sentence, he asks for a more nuanced story than “has-been” versus “comeback” - a musician still working, still listening, still choosing.