Art & Creativity Quote by Ravi Shankar

Pop is built to metabolize novelty fast; Ravi Shankar is reminding you that seriousness moves at a different metabolic rate. The line lands because it’s both a critique and a quiet self-defense from an artist who spent his career watching Western audiences “discover” Indian classical music in waves, often filtering it through whatever was trending. By framing pop as something that changes “week to week, month to month,” he isn’t sneering at the masses so much as diagnosing an industry: charts reward churn, marketing demands the next hook, and cultural attention behaves like a scrolling thumb.

Then he pivots to literature, a comparison that smuggles in a hierarchy without saying it outright. Literature implies rereading, argument, lineage, footnotes in your head. It suggests work that survives translation across time and place, even when the surface fashions rot away. Shankar’s subtext is that great music isn’t just pleasant sound; it’s a text you live with. You return to it, and it returns something different because you’ve changed. That’s a very Indian classical idea, too: ragas aren’t “songs” so much as frameworks for exploration, disciplined improvisation, and deep listening.

Context sharpens the point. Shankar came to global prominence alongside the 1960s pop explosion, famously intersecting with George Harrison and the counterculture’s hunger for “authenticity.” He watched the sitar become a sonic accessory, then disappear when the mood shifted. This quote draws a boundary: you can enjoy pop’s volatility, but don’t confuse cultural heat with artistic permanence. Great music, like literature, is built to outlast the season that first applauded it.