Art & Creativity Quote by Bill Laswell

Laswell’s line isn’t a neutral observation about genre taste; it’s a diagnosis of status anxiety. By framing conventional players as “threatened,” he shifts the debate from aesthetics to power: who gets to define musicianship, and what counts as “real” labor. Electronica, in his telling, isn’t dismissed because it lacks feeling or craft, but because it rearranges the pecking order. If a laptop can generate textures, rhythms, and entire worlds once gated behind conservatory training or expensive studios, then the old badges of legitimacy start to look less like artistry and more like credentialism.

The phrasing “don’t consider it to be as valuable” is key. He’s not arguing that electronica is automatically better; he’s calling out the cultural accounting system that assigns value based on visible effort and familiar instruments. A violinist sweating through scales reads as work. A producer nudging samples and automation curves reads, to outsiders, like cheating. Laswell’s subtext is that the labor is simply hidden: the ear training, sound design, sequencing, and obsessive iteration that electronic music demands don’t map neatly onto the romantic image of the performer.

Context matters, too. Laswell came up as a boundary-crosser in downtown New York and the broader late-20th-century studio revolution, where the studio became an instrument and genre purity became a marketing tool. His comment lands as both defense and provocation: a reminder that “conventional” often means institutionally protected, and that the loudest objections to new forms are frequently about losing cultural authority, not losing music.