Art & Creativity Quote by David Johansen

Johansen’s line is a love letter with a knife in its sleeve: music is salvation, “show business” is the price of admission. The first sentence is maximal, almost childlike in its certainty - “the best thing in the world” - the kind of absolutism you only allow yourself when you’ve been burned enough to know what you actually mean. Then he pivots, and the compliment curdles into a dig. “Almost bearable” is doing heavy work: it’s not that the industry is hard in the romantic, hustle-and-grind way; it’s corrosive, a place you endure rather than inhabit.

Coming from Johansen, the former New York Dolls frontman who later shape-shifted into Buster Poindexter, the subtext lands with extra bite. He’s lived the split between art and packaging, between the raw voltage of performance and the gaudy machinery that sells it. “Playing music” is framed as the pure act: hands on an instrument, a room reacting, the immediate feedback loop that doesn’t require permission from gatekeepers. “Show business,” by contrast, is the ecosystem: branding, press cycles, managers, trends, nostalgia tours - the parts that turn a person into a product.

The intent isn’t to sound bitter so much as to draw a boundary. Johansen offers a survival strategy for anyone inside culture work: find the core practice that still feels true, because everything around it will try to make you perform “yourself” for a living. Music doesn’t fix the circus. It just makes the tent breathable.