Art & Creativity Quote by Geezer Butler

Geezer Butler is calling out a genre that learned how to cosplay itself. Coming from Black Sabbath’s bassist and primary lyric architect, “totally produced” isn’t just a gripe about glossy studio sheen; it’s an accusation that modern metal has turned its own danger into a preset. The “conveyor belt” image is doing the heavy lifting: assembly-line efficiency, predictable parts, a product that looks right and sells well but can’t surprise you. Metal, a style once built on rupture and ugliness, becomes a compliance checklist.

The subtext is generational, but not in the lazy “old man yells at cloud” way. Butler’s era didn’t just pioneer a sound; it pioneered an attitude of risk. Early Sabbath records were imperfect and physically human, tethered to room noise, limitations, and a kind of dread you couldn’t quantize. When Butler says “It’s not music to me,” he’s drawing a hard line between sound as commodity and sound as lived experience. “Music” here means friction: the push-pull of a band actually playing, the slightly wrong note that reveals stakes, the lyrical and sonic darkness that felt earned rather than branded.

Contextually, his complaint lands in an age of genre micro-targeting: bands coached by algorithms, tones standardized by plugins, breakdowns designed for reaction videos. Metal still has innovators, but Butler is naming the mainstream incentive structure that rewards replication over menace. His point isn’t that production is evil; it’s that safety is.