Art & Creativity Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin’s line is a neat little trap: it pretends to offer safety advice while quietly accusing the listener of bad faith. If you fear music, he implies, the problem isn’t the sound but your own readiness to be moved by it. The “solution” - let it go in one ear and out the other - is the oldest defense mechanism in the book, the posture of the incurious. He’s not warning us against music; he’s mocking the kind of person who treats art as contraband.

That’s the stingy elegance of the joke. Music is literally heard through ears, so his instruction is physically plausible, but culturally absurd: you can’t keep music from doing what it does by treating yourself like an empty hallway. The subtext is that danger, when it comes to art, is inseparable from attention. If music is “dangerous,” it’s because it rearranges loyalties, stirs desire, syncs bodies, and turns private emotion into something collective. That’s precisely why power has always been suspicious of it.

Bergamin wrote under the long shadow of Spain’s political upheavals and censorship, and his broader work is steeped in the moral theatrics of belief and authority. Read in that context, the quote becomes less a quip about taste than a jab at repression: the only way to neutralize art is to practice a kind of self-censorship so thorough you barely qualify as an audience. The real target isn’t music. It’s the fearful imagination that calls it dangerous, then congratulates itself for refusing to listen.