Art & Creativity Quote by Keith Richards

Richards is taking a swipe at the moment rock stopped being mostly heard and started being endlessly seen. Calling TV “suspicious” isn’t just cranky anti-tech posture; it frames the medium as inherently untrustworthy, a machine built to flatten nuance into spectacle. The follow-up line sharpens the blade: music and video aren’t merely different languages, they’re an “unhappy marriage” - a relationship held together by obligation, branding, and commercial gravity rather than genuine intimacy.

The intent feels protective. Richards comes out of an era when the mystique of a band lived in sound, rumor, and the live room: you earned the image by surviving the music. Video reverses that hierarchy. It promotes the photogenic hook over the messy, physical truth of performance, turning songs into “content” with plot points, product placement, and a face optimized for the frame. That’s why the metaphor works: marriage implies permanence and public display, exactly what the music industry wanted once MTV made visibility a revenue stream.

There’s subtext, too, in Richards’s particular persona. The Stones sold image as aggressively as anyone, yet his complaint argues for a line between iconography that grows organically and visuals that dictate interpretation. A great riff invites the listener to project; a music video collapses that imaginative space into one canonical meaning. Richards isn’t rejecting visuals outright - he’s rejecting the power shift: when TV arrives, the song stops being the boss.