Art & Creativity Quote by Tom Jenkinson

Tom Jenkinson’s line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a mission statement disguised as small talk. “All different sorts of purposes” rejects the tidy myth of the musician as a single-idea artisan - the tortured auteur who makes “one kind of music” for “one kind of feeling.” Jenkinson, better known as Squarepusher, comes out of a culture that treats sound as a toolkit: drum programming as engineering, bass as physical force, melody as a flicker of intimacy, irony as a texture. The sentence refuses to pick a lane because his work rarely does.

The subtext is pragmatic, almost anti-romantic. He’s saying music isn’t a sacred object; it’s an instrument you can aim at multiple targets: dancefloor propulsion, headphone detail, technical flex, satire, even misdirection. That matters in electronic music, where audiences often demand purity (the “real” rave track, the “real” jazz chops, the “real” experimental edge). Jenkinson’s career has been an argument against genre as a moral category. He can write something punishingly fast, then pivot to something almost tender, and neither move has to be justified as “growth” or “selling out.” It’s just purpose.

Contextually, it lands in the late-90s/early-2000s moment when IDM and club music were being sorted into warring drawers: brainy vs. bodily, art vs. entertainment. Jenkinson’s line quietly declines the entire sorting process. The power is in its plainness: a refusal to turn taste into testimony.