Creativity Quote by Bill Laswell

Laswell’s line cuts through the mystique that the culture industry loves to sell: “style” isn’t born on a runway or in a branding deck, it’s the exhaust trail of experimentation. Coming from a musician whose career is basically a long argument for cross-pollination - jazz, dub, funk, ambient, world traditions, studio-as-instrument - it reads like a defense of the messy first draft against the polished final product.

The intent is practical, almost producer-minded. He’s mapping a pipeline: idea -> act -> imitation -> aggregation -> trend -> “style.” That sequence demotes style from sacred identity to social logistics. In other words, what we treat as an aesthetic essence is often just a record of who got copied at scale. The subtext is a quiet jab at gatekeeping: if style is downstream from copying, then the people who police “authenticity” are often guarding a moving target they didn’t invent.

There’s also an implicit ethics here. Laswell isn’t condemning copying; he’s acknowledging it as the engine. What matters is the first leap - someone doing something that doesn’t yet have a name - and then what happens when the leap gets packaged. Trendiness becomes a kind of laundering process: the original risk is diluted, the rough edges are sanded, and suddenly the culture calls it a “style” like it arrived fully formed.

Read in the context of music scenes, it’s a warning and a permission slip. Don’t worship style. Make the move first, accept the echoes, and remember that tomorrow’s “signature sound” is usually yesterday’s weird idea, repeated until it felt inevitable.