Creativity Quote by Joshua Homme

Homme is allergic to the kind of celebrity that shrinks a person into trivia, and he frames it like a trap you don’t notice until you’re already stuck. “The web of things” is a deliberately vague phrase that mimics the internet’s ambient hum: rumor, chatter, branding, hot takes, all braided together until it feels like “things” just happen to you. The punchline detail - “what kind of breakfast cereal you like” - is doing heavy lifting. It’s funny because it’s so aggressively meaningless, but it’s also a quiet indictment of an attention economy that can’t tell the difference between intimate and important.

The intent isn’t merely to complain about fame; it’s to describe a loss of agency. “Sometimes you actually get caught” suggests a reluctant participant, someone who didn’t sign up to become a lifestyle product but finds his identity packaged anyway. The ellipsis matters, too: it’s the sound of someone searching for the right word and landing on the absurdity of it. That hesitation reads as genuine annoyance rather than a rehearsed rant.

Contextually, this fits a rock era where musicians are expected to be content farms - constantly interviewable, constantly meme-able, with “relatability” measured in consumer preferences. Homme’s subtext is that this is a distraction with a cost: when the discourse is cereal, the art becomes just another accessory. He’s not posturing above the audience; he’s pointing at the machinery that turns a human into clickable inventory.