Creativity Quote by Geezer Butler

Polish is a kind of betrayal in rock: the moment you sand off the rough edges, you also sand off the proof that a human being was there. Geezer Butler’s line reads like a practical studio note, but it’s really a worldview shaped by heavy metal’s origin story. Black Sabbath didn’t arrive as immaculate technicians; they arrived as a physical sensation - blunt riffs, anxious space between notes, and a bass tone that felt more like weather than melody. Over-polishing that material doesn’t just “clean it up.” It changes the contract with the listener, swapping confrontation for comfort.

The intent is defensive and aesthetic at once. Butler is guarding the first-take electricity that happens when musicians are still a little ahead of their own control. That’s where urgency lives: tiny timing mismatches, fret noise, the breath before a chorus, the amplifier’s imperfect bite. In a genre built on heaviness and dread, imperfection isn’t a flaw; it’s the mechanism that makes the mood believable. When everything snaps to a grid and every frequency is buffed to a showroom shine, the music can start to feel like a product demonstrating “rock” rather than rock itself.

The subtext also pokes at modern production culture: endless revisions, quantization, pitch correction, the tyranny of “professional.” Butler’s point isn’t anti-craft. It’s anti-sanitization. Feeling, here, is the residue of risk - and too much polish is the sound of risk being edited out.