Art & Creativity Quote by Greg Ginn

Ginn is making a quietly ruthless argument about what actually cuts through the noise: not polish, not pedigree, not even genre correctness, but motive. In the world of demos, you can hear the reason a band exists. If the “primary motivation” is the music itself, he’s saying, the recording carries a charge that survives bad mic placement, cheap gear, and clumsy mixes. Enthusiasm becomes an audible artifact.

The subtext is a rebuke to careerism. Demos, especially in punk and DIY ecosystems Ginn came up in, are supposed to be evidence of urgency, not a pre-interview for a marketing internship. He’s positioning excitement as a kind of truth serum: you can fake competence, but it’s harder to fake necessity. When someone needs the song to exist, they play like the stakes are real. That’s what labels, bookers, and other musicians respond to, because it signals stamina. A band motivated by the music will keep going when the van breaks down and the gig pays in drink tickets.

Context matters: Ginn isn’t talking from a neutral A&R perch. As a musician who helped shape hardcore’s stripped-down ethics (and ran SST, where demos were currency), he’s defending an aesthetic where rawness is not a flaw but a tell. The line also doubles as a standard for gatekeeping that feels almost moral: excitement is “the most important ingredient” because it’s the one thing you can’t outsource.