Creativity Quote by Chris Lowe

It lands like a punchline with a bruise underneath: power doesn’t just corrupt, it cooks the brain. Coming from Chris Lowe - best known for Pet Shop Boys’ cool, arch distance - the line isn’t a policy memo so much as a pop-cultural diagnosis. “Beginning to think” performs a shrug of humility, the casual tone of someone chatting over a pint. That’s the feint. The actual accusation is brutal: prolonged leadership breeds a kind of self-sealing delusion, an insulated reality where consequences stop registering and ego starts writing its own news.

The two-term limit is doing double duty. On the surface, it echoes the familiar democratic guardrail (you can almost hear the American reference), but it’s also a tidy pop lyric structure: simple, countable, rhythm-ready. Lowe weaponizes that simplicity to make the idea feel like common sense rather than ideology. “Madness” is deliberately unspecific, letting the listener supply their preferred villain - the grandstanding strongman, the exhausted technocrat, the leader who mistakes visibility for virtue. It’s elastic enough to travel across countries and decades.

The subtext is a musician’s skepticism toward spectacle. Pop stars know how quickly applause becomes a feedback loop; politics, in this framing, is just the longest-running tour. The line reads as a wry defense of rotation, humility, and exit ramps - not because leaders are uniquely evil, but because the job itself rewards the kind of self-mythology that, given enough time, starts to sound like sanity from the inside.