Creativity Quote by Dave Navarro

Navarro’s line is a neat little refusal to play the game everyone demands of rock musicians: rankings, legacies, “who did it better.” By calling comparison “impossible,” he isn’t claiming critics lack the data; he’s rejecting the premise that art is a sport with a scoreboard. The lovers analogy does the heavy lifting. It smuggles bands out of the marketplace and into the private, irrational territory of attachment, memory, and chemistry. You don’t “objectively” prefer someone who once saved you at 2 a.m. with a phone call; you just do. Likewise, a band becomes a lover when it’s tied to a specific version of you.

The subtext is protective, almost defensive: stop forcing fidelity tests. In rock culture, to love one band can read as disloyalty to another, especially inside scenes where tribal identity is part of the deal. Navarro, a musician whose career spans shifting lineups and overlapping projects (Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, TV judging), knows how quickly audiences turn taste into allegiance and allegiance into moral posture.

It also gently punctures the critic’s posture of neutrality. Comparing lovers is possible in the most mundane sense, but it feels like a category error, the kind that reduces lived experience to bullet points. That’s the point: musical value isn’t just craft, it’s intimacy. Navarro’s wit lies in making a cultural argument sound like common sense, and in reminding us that our “favorite band” is often less an opinion than a relationship.