Creativity Quote by Greg Ginn

Greg Ginn is admitting, with a punk lifer’s bluntness, that taste is a terrible business plan. The line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a mission statement for an old-school independent label: put out what you believe in, then do the unglamorous work of building a world around it.

The key friction is in “the things that I like best.” Ginn isn’t talking about market gaps or trend forecasting; he’s talking about obsession. That’s the emotional engine of DIY culture, and also its liability. If your catalog is guided by personal fixation, every release becomes a bespoke problem: different sound, different scene, different set of people to convince. “Finding an audience for each record” is the tell. It rejects the idea of one coherent brand funneling fans from release to release. Instead, he describes a label as a series of small acts of evangelism.

There’s subtext, too, about the hidden labor of “authenticity.” Punk mythology loves the romance of independence, but Ginn points to the grind: distribution, promotion, and the constant risk of pressing something you love that nobody buys. It’s also a subtle defense against the accusation that indie labels are messy, inconsistent, or stubborn. Yes, it’s inefficient. That’s the point. He frames curatorial chaos as integrity.

In context, it echoes SST’s legacy: influential precisely because it didn’t behave like a neat genre pipeline. The quote lands as a reminder that “taste” isn’t just identity; it’s logistics, and sometimes a financial dare.