Art & Creativity Quote by Les Baxter

A quiet flex is hiding in Baxter's phrasing: "cheapening" treats compromise not as strategy but as contamination. He's not merely defending personal taste; he's arguing that music has a dignity you can either honor or devalue. The line lands because it flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of the public judging the artist, Baxter suggests "public taste" is often an invention - a committee-made hallucination ("what some people think") that gets used to discipline creativity.

The intent is defensive but also provocative: he draws a boundary between craft and commerce without pretending commerce doesn't exist. Baxter worked in the thick of mid-century American entertainment, where lounge, exotica, film scoring, and easy listening lived in the same ecosystem as radio programmers and label executives. That world ran on mood management and market research before market research had the modern brand language for it. His stance reads like a refusal to let gatekeepers turn music into background product.

The subtext is about respect - for the listener and for the material. He implies that pandering doesn't actually serve the audience; it serves an anxious middle layer of tastemakers who underestimate what people can handle. Coming from an arranger-composer associated with lush, cinematic sound, the quote also doubles as a defense of sophistication in popular forms: complexity, atmosphere, and oddness don't have to apologize for themselves. It's an artist insisting that accessibility isn't the same as dilution, and that "taste" shouldn't be a leash.