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Art & Creativity Quote by Phil Anselmo

"It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... There's too much of it out there"

About this Quote

Anselmo’s half-shrugging cadence - the “I don’t know” doing as much work as the complaint - reads like an artist watching a scene drift away from him in real time. He’s not attacking theatrics because he can’t imagine them; he’s reacting to a market where theatrics have started to feel compulsory, like a dress code for legitimacy. The target isn’t makeup or costumes themselves, but the sense that visual branding has become a default substitute for danger, conviction, or craft.

The phrasing “painted up special way” is telling: it’s not “expressive” or “inventive,” it’s “special,” a consumer adjective, like a limited-edition product. “Tailor made outfit” lands with similar suspicion - custom as status signal, not as necessity. Underneath is a very metal anxiety: authenticity being priced out by presentation, sound being treated as secondary to a look that photographs well and sells faster.

Contextually, this is a musician from a culture that built its identity on sweat-over-spectacle suddenly facing an era where images travel farther than riffs. By the late ’80s and ’90s, metal had competing factions: glam’s polish, extreme metal’s grime, industrial’s stylization. Anselmo is staking a claim for the unadorned body onstage - not as purity theater, but as refusal. His gripe is really about saturation: “too much of it out there” suggests trend fatigue, the moment when rebellion becomes a template, and the “outsider” uniform turns into just another costume rack.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Anselmo, Phil. (2026, February 17). It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... There's too much of it out there. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-seems-like-if-you-are-not-painted-up-special-122027/

Chicago Style
Anselmo, Phil. "It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... There's too much of it out there." FixQuotes. February 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-seems-like-if-you-are-not-painted-up-special-122027/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... There's too much of it out there." FixQuotes, 17 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-seems-like-if-you-are-not-painted-up-special-122027/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2026.

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Phil Anselmo on authenticity over stage costumes
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About the Author

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Phil Anselmo (born June 30, 1968) is a Musician from USA.

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