Creativity Quote by Jeff Ament

Ament’s line lands like a half-joke with a real wound underneath it: “Make movies” is a plea for craft; “Don’t make videos” is a rejection of the cheap dopamine economy that swallowed music. Coming from a musician who grew up in the album era and helped define a band built on atmosphere and live intensity, the phrase isn’t really about aspect ratios or cameras. It’s about ambition and attention. “Movie” implies narrative, pacing, mood, a reason to stay in the room. “Video” signals content: disposable, endlessly scrollable, optimized for clicks instead of memory.

The blunt moral word “evil” is doing a lot of work. It’s not theology; it’s cultural triage. Ament is naming the way platforms encourage artists to perform constant availability, to compress songs, personas, and ideas into bite-size proof-of-life. That system doesn’t just change marketing; it changes the art upstream. If you’re always feeding the feed, you start writing toward the teaser, the hook that survives a mute autoplay, the aesthetic that reads instantly on a phone.

There’s also a defensive pride here: rock’s old promise that music can create a world, not just a clip. “Make movies” is advice to collaborators, younger artists, maybe even to himself: build something with stakes, something that can’t be mistaken for an ad. The provocation works because it’s exaggerated but accurate in spirit: “video” has become less a medium than a mandate, and mandates are the enemy of imagination.