Creativity Quote by Nikki Sixx

Nikki Sixx is doing a neat bit of brand judo here: he nods at commercial success without surrendering to it. “If your album sells, that’s cool” reads like a shrug, but it’s a calculated shrug - sales are framed as a side effect, not the point. The real payoff isn’t money or chart position; it’s discovery. “More people find out about you” turns the marketplace into a loudspeaker, not a judge.

Then he tightens the screw with “get turned on,” a phrase that signals both sensuality and initiation. It suggests the album is foreplay, the gateway drug. The destination is what the band is “really about,” and that word “really” matters: it draws a hard line between the mediated product (a record, polished and packaged) and the authentic core (the stage, the volume, the sweat). Sixx is defending rock’s old hierarchy where the live show is truth and the recording is a postcard.

The context is the classic 70s/80s arena-rock contradiction: bands needed big-label machinery and radio rotation to scale, yet had to maintain outlaw credibility. Motley Crue, especially, sold transgression as a product; Sixx’s phrasing tries to keep the transgression from sounding like a marketing plan. It’s also a quiet flex. A “live rock and roll band” implies stamina, danger, and proof - something you can’t pirate, algorithmically playlist, or fully domesticate. The record sells; the band converts.