Creativity Quote by Sebastian Bach

There is a particular late-90s sting in Bach's complaint: the moment when the music video stopped being a rite of passage and became a luxury product with no guaranteed audience. He frames it like a gambler refusing a rigged table. If MTV (or whatever gatekeeper is implied) won't play "new rock bands", then the entire economics of visibility collapses. The quote isn't nostalgia for hair metal excess as much as a blunt cost-benefit memo from someone who watched the old system die in real time.

The "guy like me" line does double duty. It's self-deprecating on the surface, but it's also a flex: Bach is famous enough to know what 250 grand used to buy, and irritated enough to admit it no longer buys anything. He's pointing to a cultural demotion, from mainstream rock celebrity to niche act competing for scraps of attention, in an era when pop and hip-hop were increasingly treated as the network's lifeblood. The subtext is less "MTV is evil" than "the platform changed the rules mid-game and called it progress."

The intent is practical, not poetic: it's an artist talking about infrastructure. You can hear the resentment of being asked to keep funding the spectacle while the distribution channel quietly opts out. In that tension sits a broader truth about the entertainment industry: prestige and expense are meaningless when the audience has already been redirected elsewhere.