Creativity Quote by Bill Laswell

Laswell isn’t offering a feel-good plea for tolerance; he’s diagnosing an industry reflex. Coming from a producer and bassist who built a career splicing genres, scenes, and cultures - punk with dub, jazz with hip-hop, New York with Morocco - the line reads like a field report from the borderlands of taste. When he says people fear what they don’t understand, he’s talking about confusion as a social hazard: not just “I don’t get it,” but “If I don’t get it, I might lose my place.”

The subtext is brutally practical. “Relate” isn’t emotional empathy here; it’s code for having a usable category. Music worlds run on categories because categories run on gatekeeping: radio formats, label departments, press angles, playlists, scenes. Laswell’s list - career, image - names the real incentives behind aesthetic snobbery. Dislike is often a mask for risk management. If a sound can’t be explained quickly, it can’t be sold quickly; if it can’t be sold, it becomes a threat to the people whose status depends on being tastemakers.

The intent lands like a quiet indictment of how innovation gets punished. He frames fear as a defense mechanism for institutions and egos, not an individual moral failing. Security and existence sound dramatic, but in creative economies they’re literal: rent, reputation, relevance. Laswell is arguing that the resistance to “new” art is rarely about the art. It’s about the panic of losing a stable identity - and the uncomfortable fact that unfamiliar music can expose how much of that identity is just borrowed consensus.