Creativity Quote by Peter Steele

Steele’s jab lands because it’s both a genre dismissal and a defense mechanism from a particular rock-era worldview: music as melody, virtuosity, and a certain kind of “earned” emotion. Calling rap “bad poetry” isn’t just an insult to lyrical craft; it’s a way of framing the whole form as a failed attempt at something older and “higher,” smuggling in the idea that rap wants to be literature but can’t clear the bar. The second blade - “people that can’t sing” - is even more loaded. It equates musical legitimacy with pitch and traditional vocal technique, deliberately ignoring that rap’s core skills live elsewhere: rhythm, phrasing, breath control, timing, tone, and verbal agility.

The intent reads like provocation, the kind of barbed one-liner that thrives in scenes where taste is policed through contempt. Steele came out of a heavy/metal ecosystem that often defined itself against pop and hip-hop, especially as rap’s cultural power exploded in the late 80s and 90s. Underneath the snark is anxiety about shifting center stage: if a microphone plus words can move crowds without “singing,” then the old hierarchies - the guitarist as hero, the vocalist as conduit - start to wobble.

The line “That’s my definition” is the tell: he’s not making an argument so much as staking identity. It’s less criticism than boundary-drawing, a quick cultural fence built out of taste, masculinity, and genre tribalism.