Creativity Quote by Joan Jett

Joan Jett isn’t romanticizing an instrument; she’s staking a claim to personhood in a culture that has long treated women with guitars as a novelty, a gimmick, or a temporary guest in rock’s clubhouse. “My guitar is not a thing” rejects the usual consumer logic around gear and brand. The guitar isn’t merchandise or even a tool. It’s prosthetic identity: the object becomes a body part, a voice box, a weapon, a shield.

The phrasing is blunt on purpose. Jett’s whole aesthetic has always been blunt - leather-jacket directness, riffs that hit like a door slam, lyrics that don’t apologize for desire or rage. Calling the guitar “an extension of myself” collapses the distance between musician and machine. It’s a reminder that performance isn’t just skill; it’s embodiment. She’s telling you that the sound you hear is not decoration on top of a personality - it is the personality, amplified.

The subtext is also about control. For women in rock, the industry often tries to relocate authorship: producers shape the sound, managers shape the image, critics police legitimacy. Jett’s line refuses all that outsourcing. “It is who I am” is ownership language, but it’s also boundary language: don’t separate the artist from the instrument, don’t reduce her to a frontwoman, don’t treat the guitar as a prop.

Context matters: Jett came up through The Runaways and then had to brute-force her way into lasting credibility. The quote carries that history - not inspirational fluff, but a hard-earned refusal to be edited down.