Aging & Wisdom Quote by Michael Hutchence

Hutchence’s line has the loose, backstage candor of a musician thinking out loud about a problem that’s both intimate and structural. Calling racism “essentially natural” is the risky hook: it flirts with a biological shrug, the kind that can accidentally launder prejudice as inevitability. But the sentence keeps pivoting. He tags it as “old fashioned,” demoting racism from a timeless human truth to a dated style choice, then frames it as an “evolutionary phase,” a word that’s less science than storyline. The subtext is faith in cultural progress: racism isn’t destiny, it’s debris.

That optimism reads very 1990s. Hutchence came up in a pop ecosystem selling cosmopolitan cool - MTV globalization, anti-apartheid benefit concerts, the idea that exposure and intermingling would melt borders and biases. In that context, “Ultimately it won’t exist” sounds like a performer’s belief in the crowd: put enough different people in the same room singing the same chorus and the uglier categories start to feel embarrassed.

The intent seems less to diagnose racism correctly than to morally reclassify it. If racism is “old fashioned,” then being racist is tacky, behind the times, uncool. That’s a cultural tactic musicians often reach for: not policy, not theory, but vibe. Still, the line’s weakness is its comfort. Calling racism a phase implies an automatic endpoint, sidestepping how racism mutates, modernizes, and gets rebuilt through institutions long after people learn the right lyrics.